We've been closely watching.
Lilly is narrowing the gap with Novo Nordisk.
The sales are coming quite close. I mean, Lilly had 1.2 billion in sales
of Bound, which only launched a few months ago, and Novo Nordisk had 1.7
billion in sales of its weight loss drug Wegovy, which they reported yesterday.
And Wegovy has been on the market for several years.
So Lilly is like really moving fast. Sales are ramping up extremely quickly
and we are watching closely to see what happens.
I guess the next step for these drugs is I guess an oral.
Yeah, but exactly where where are we on that?
We're one of the companies saying both companies have been working on pills,
which obviously they think could help not only expand the market in the U.S.,
but expand ex-U.S. because there are certain markets that
research has shown prefer pills over shots.
Japan is one of them, interestingly. So that's kind of the next step here.
Both of the companies are studying these drugs.
Novo, though, has had a lot of trouble with supply and particularly making
enough of the active ingredient that's used in their drugs.
The pill uses the same active ingredient and it uses more of it.
So they're kind of struggling right now. They can't really launch that pill until
they get a handle on supply. Let's go to the big.
Sorry about that. Didn't turn on my mike.
Let's go to the big take, because that was quite interesting and it feeds into
the whole story. And the title is What it's Like when it
was Epic. Takes over an entire town.
By the way, Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, great story.
Thanks. So, thank you.
Because I have I spent a ton of time in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Really know of what you speak. And I send it to a buddy who lives
there. She knows half the people in the
article. That's really.
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
Wow. I'm just really curious as to how you
found this town. So we worked with the data team on this
story, and we got data at the three zip code level.
So we're looking at, you know, cities and sort of their surrounding areas.
And we were looking all across the country.
A few other spots came up like Huntsville, Alabama, and we kind of were
digging around to see just if people were talking about the drugs online, you
know, if there were doctors in the area that were prescribing them.
And we honed in on Bowling Green specifically because Kentucky as a state
has the highest concentration of weight loss drug users in the country.
So we were like, oh, well, if this city is showing up in our data, this is
probably a good a good place to to go and see what's happening.
And so started talking to people there and like, you know, it kind of spreads
like wildfire. You talk to one person who's on the
drugs and they're like, Oh, talk to my friend, talk to my neighbor.
They're on the drugs, too. And it just kind of was easy to find
people after that. Why is that?
Why is it the the use so concentrated in a place like Kentucky?
Is that just simply because there's more people there that qualify from a Yeah, I
guess, awake perspective, right? I mean, that's a piece of it, which is
is actually a good thing. I mean, we hear so much about the drugs
in New York and in Hollywood, but when we're looking at actual obesity rates,
those aren't the places that have the highest concentration of people with
obesity or diabetes. In Kentucky, there are high rates of
obesity and diabetes. There's also there were employers, large
employers in the area that were covering the drugs so people could get access to
them. Bowling Green in particular, is a very
middle class area. So when people couldn't get coverage for
the drugs, they were willing to pay out of pocket for it.
So that kind of made the conditions ripe for these drugs to take off in Bowling
Green. When when you write the article, you
also talk about the compound drugs, killers.
Walk us through what a compound drug is, why it's allowed.
And is it legit? Yeah, I mean, that has been a really big
thing and a really big part of this weight loss drug market as of recently
because, you know, and that fits in with this supply issue.
Lilly and Novo have really been struggling to keep up with supply.
So when drugs are in shortage, officially these compounding pharmacies
are allowed to make similar versions, copycat versions, we call them, to help,
you know, patients who are unable to get prescriptions for the drugs.
But what's happened is, you know, in this gap, it's kind of allowed these
compounding pharmacies to proliferate and not all of them are exactly
legitimate. And so there's a lot of medical supplies
that are using the compounding drugs. Telehealth companies that are selling
the compounding drugs like hims. And hers is one that comes up often.
And in Bowling Green, it's really taken off as well.
There's like all of these medical supplies popping up, weight loss clinics
popping up that are offering compounded or just illegitimate versions of the
drugs. And, you know, that's become a big thing
there as well. Well, for the compounded drugs, are they
are they as effective? Are they safe?
What do we know about them? That's kind of the problem, is because,
you know, pharmaceutical products are so tightly regulated and require so many
studies from these drug makers. But the compounded drugs are not studied
and they're not regulated in the same. Why there's not the same FDA oversight.
So when we think about are these drugs as effective?
The answer is like, we don't really know because we don't have studies that prove
that. And definitely why would that ever be
allowed? We understand that it's a tight supply
shortage. Got it?
Got it. But then why is it like, here's an
option, Take a drug that you don't really know works?
What's in it? Why is it allowed?
It's because, I mean, normally, like compounding the reason that it exists is
is more on an individual basis. So if a person is allergic to a certain
ingredient or like a coloring and a drug compounding pharmacies can, you know,
tailor make those drugs for that specific patient, or if a drug is in
shortage and and a person can't get access to it, it's not really supposed
to be they're not supposed to be acting like drug makers.
But that's kind of what we're seeing happening with these weight loss drugs
because of the demand for them.