by Maggie Fick and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen
LONDON/COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Novo Nordisk, the maker of weight loss drug Wegovy, said on Friday it would invest $6 billion (5.62 billion euros) to boost its production in Denmark, while signaling that the industry was far from being able to produce enough weight loss treatments to meet global demand.
The Danish pharmaceutical group is enjoying great success with its treatment for obesity, but it is facing shortages which have forced it to limit the number of patients.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called obesity a “growing epidemic” and estimates that more than a billion adults worldwide will be affected by 2030.
“With the capabilities we are building and the competition that is growing, I think we are far from reaching a billion people,” said the group’s chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, in an interview with Reuters.
“I believe we will have to continually invest,” he added.
US and UK regulators this week approved Eli Lilly’s weight loss treatment, while AstraZeneca invested in licensing an oral obesity drug candidate from Chinese company Eccogene.
Novo Nordisk said the investment of more than DKK 42 billion in the expansion of its plant in Kalundborg, Denmark, will strengthen its active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing capacity, as well as other parts of its supply chain, such as packaging.
This will include Wegovy’s API as well as Novo’s diabetes treatment Ozempic.
According to a spokesperson for the group, this investment is the largest made by a private sector company in Denmark.
Novo Nordisk also plans to acquire other companies producing early or mid-stage drugs, through add-on deals that could amount to a few billion dollars.
“Diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, the entire cardiometabolic space, but also rare blood diseases, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, are all areas in which we believe we have a strong position,” said Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen.
(Reporting Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; French version Diana Mandiá, editing by Kate Entringer)
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