After a period of diversification, Novo Nordisk is returning to its roots by focusing on the 2 billion people with diabetes, obesity or overweight.
Novo Nordisk is intensifying its focus on diabetes and obesity, pulling back from indications unrelated to those conditions as it works to expand the GLP-1 market.
Long-time diabetes specialist Novo has diversified in recent years, expanding into rare diseases, paying $725 million for a cardiovascular disease biotech and studying its GLP-1 drug semaglutide in Alzheimer’s disease. Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Tuesday, Novo CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar said the company will keep the rare disease unit but narrow the focus of its core business.
“The focus, again, will go back to obesity and diabetes,” he told conference attendees.
Specifically, patients with diabetes or obesity will be the starting point for Novo programs outside of rare diseases, Doustdar said. The company will continue to target other indications but only if they are comorbidities in patients with diabetes, obesity or overweight. The strategy reflects the CEO’s belief that, while diversification works for some companies, Novo is at its best when it focuses.
This is a partial reversal of a long-standing Novo policy. Helge Lund, then chair of Novo’s board, said at the company’s annual general meeting in 2019 that “success in the long term can only be realized through the diversification of the product portfolio.”
Doustdar has also suggested that Novo will continue to look externally to expand its obesity portfolio, telling Bloomberg on the sidelines of JPM that the company is prepared to go “very big.”
With renewed focus and potential business development, Doustdar even “expressed confidence” that his strategy could help Novo reestablish its position as market leader in obesity, according to BMO Capital Markets—a position that Eli Lilly has soundly stolen. Indeed, the BMO analysts remain cautious, saying they are awaiting firm evidence that Novo can regain momentum after rival drugs from both Lilly and compounders slowed its growth in 2025.
Novo and Lilly currently only reach a fraction of the estimated 2 billion people globally, according to Doustdar, 100 million of them in the U.S., with diabetes, obesity or overweight. Increasing uptake is central to his plans for growing sales.
“Right now, we are being judged [on] how many patients are being switched between us and Eli Lilly. Us and Lilly combined have probably 10 million, 15 million patients. What about the other 85 million? We need to get to them,” Doustdar said. “A big part of those people, by the way, don’t want an injection. They’re waiting for the pill. So going into expanding the market has been very, very important.”
Novo is the first company to offer a GLP-1 weight-loss pill for obesity in the U.S. The company launched its oral Wegovy formulation at the start of the year. Lilly is awaiting an FDA decision on its rival oral GLP-1 drug orforglipron, which some observers believe has advantages over Novo’s product.
BMO analysts said the “broad fasting requirement associated with the Wegovy pill could be somewhat of a barrier to uptake and share recapture once orforglipron is approved.” The effect prevents patients from eating, drinking or taking other oral medications for 30 minutes after dosing. Lilly’s orforglipron trials lacked such a restriction.
Doustdar defended the Wegovy pill’s prospects, pointing to the 1.5 million people who take Novo’s oral GLP-1 drug Rybelsus for diabetes to make the case that the dosing restriction is manageable. Rybelsus is also a semaglutide formulation that requires 30 minutes of fasting after it’s taken. The Novo CEO said Lilly’s orforglipron trial protocol prevented patients from taking the oral GLP-1 drug within two to four hours of administering a specific statin, a medicine class widely used by people with obesity.
