A lawsuit and FDA warning ensued after Hims & Hers launched a compounded version of Novo Nordisk’s new obesity pill, more Big Pharma report earnings—including from weight loss rivals Novo and Eli Lilly—and the gene therapy space sees another rejection.
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Last Thursday, Hims & Hers launched a compounded version of Novo’s oral Wegovy, approved just before Christmas and launched in early January. Novo was, not surprisingly, none too pleased. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary denounced “illegal copycat drugs” in an X post the same day without naming Hims, which then said it would not sell the oral weight loss drug. Novo sued the consumer healthcare company for patent infringement, seeking potentially hundreds of millions in damages. Then it emerged that FDA hit Hims with a warning letter last year about infestations of vermin at a facility it owns, including rodents, birds and insects, as well as a live spider in a production area.
The timing of all the Hims drama is interesting, because BioSpace was already covering Novo, Lilly and their blockbuster GLP weight loss drugs as both companies—and others—reported 2025 fourth quarter and full year earnings. Eli Lilly and Novo both reported last Wednesday, and both spoke of Novo’s oral Wegovy launch positively. But the calls had two very different tones, as Lilly beat Q4 2025 analyst consensus by more than a billion dollars while Novo projected sales to decline by 5% in 2026.
In other recent earnings calls, AbbVie touted strong Skyrizi and Rinvoq sales, and the company continues to follow Johnson & Johnson’s lead into the psychedelics space. And Biogen discussed the highly anticipated readout of its tau-targeting therapy for Alzheimer’s.
Finally, in gene therapy, Sarepta struggles to recover from last year’s patient deaths as other DMD contenders near the market; uniQure pauses two arms of a clinical trial for Fabry disease; and Ultragenyx resubmits its in vivo gene therapy UX111 for the treatment of Sanfilippo syndrome type A.
