Oral weight-loss drugs could account for a third or more of the global GLP-1 market by 2030, a higher percentage than the company originally anticipated, a Novo Nordisk executive said on Monday.
“In our first assumption, injectables dominated the market and pills played a smaller role,” Ludovic Helfgott, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president for product and portfolio strategy, told Reuters on the sidelines of the JP Morgan Healthcare conference.
“We believe that the pill could, in fact, represent more than a third of this overall market as we move forward,” he added.
Helfgott said Novo’s updated vision reflects a better understanding of patient behavior in what he described as an increasingly consumer-driven obesity market in which many patients pay out of pocket.
The company believes its newly launched oral version of Wegovy could expand treatment to groups that have until now been underrepresented in GLP-1 use, including men and younger patients.
He said some potential users of the new pill launched last week do not fully recognize obesity as a disease or are “in denial”, arguing that an oral option “opens up categories of the population” that have been harder to reach with injectables.
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The reassessment comes as analysts debate the long-term role of oral GLP-1s.
Last year, analysts at TD Cowen estimated that GLP-1 pills will account for a ten percent share of the global obesity drug market by 2030, and could reach $150 billion by then.
Late last year, Novo carried out patient segmentation and targeting exercises, Helfgott said, using artificial intelligence models and other tools to classify potential new GLP-1 users into six or seven behavioral groups.
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The work is helping the drug maker understand what motivates people to start taking a weight loss medication.
