After getting the crucial first-mover advantage with an FDA approval for a weight loss pill, Novo Nordisk looks to win the market before rival Lilly can arrive with its own oral option for obesity.
After winning the race to get an obesity pill approved just before Christmas, Novo Nordisk has made oral Wegovy available in the U.S. starting Monday.
The out-of-pocket price for oral Wegovy—the company’s semaglutide drug for obesity—is set at $149 per month for 1.5-mg and 4-mg doses, with higher 9-mg and 25-mg doses costing $299 per month. Through insurance, the cost could drop to $25 per month, according to the company’s website for the drug.
Those prices make the pill version slightly cheaper than the injectable version for customers paying out-of-pocket. The two lowest doses of the injectable—0.25 mg and 0.5 mg—cost $199 per month for the first two months, with Novo also promising that with insurance the injectable can be had at $25 per month.
Oral Wegovy is available through brick-and-mortar pharmacies such as CVS and Costco, and can also be obtained through telehealth platforms like GoodRx, Ro and LifeMD, as well as Novo’s own direct-to-consumer platform NovoCare Pharmacy.
Shares of Novo were up about 2.6% to $53.75 in premarket trading Monday morning.
The $149 price tag announced for oral Wegovy puts its price roughly at the same level as the $150 that the company promised in a deal with the federal government late last year, at least for initial doses. Other GLP-1 drugs could be offered at $350 per month through the deal.
Novo got FDA approval for the oral form of its GLP-1 blockbuster Wegovy on December 22, announcing plans to make the drug available in January. Winning the race to the FDA gave the company a crucial, but perhaps short-lived, edge after a year of battered stock prices and competitors nipping at its heels.
Eli Lilly, its main rival in the obesity space with its tirzepatide drug Zepbound, got a coveted Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher in November for its next-generation oral obesity drug orfoglipron. Ilya Yuffa, president of Lilly USA, said at a conference in December that the company is aiming to launch orfoglipron in the second quarter of 2026.
Lilly announced results from a Phase III trial for orfoglipron in August last year, showing that the drug cut patients weight by more than 10%. Those results put the company on track to seek approval for the drug from the FDA, with a National Priority Voucher potentially cutting the drug’s review time to 1–2 months.
Pointing to the fact that orfoglipron is a small molecule and not a peptide like Wegovy, making it easier to manufacture, analysts at the time said that Lilly is looking at a “double-digit billion dollar opportunity” in orfoglipron’s approval.
