Factbox: How Novo Nordisk makes its weight-loss drug Wegovy
01/11/2023 10:14
By Maggie Fick
LONDON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Novo Nordisk NOVOb.CO is
spending billions of dollars to boost output and ease shortages
of its hugely popular, highly effective weight-loss medicine
Wegovy.
The Danish drugmaker, which reports its third-quarter
results on Nov. 2, has warned U.S. demand will continue to
outpace supplies of the weekly self-injection into 2024.
Novo depends upon a number of companies to help produce
Wegovy, but it has released scant details on its supply chain
for the weight-loss medicine and its diabetes drug Ozempic
containing the same active ingredient.
Here are the details of the manufacturing supply chain,
based on public statements by Novo and Reuters' reporting:
ACTIVE PHARMACEUTICAL INGREDIENT (API)
The active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) contained in
Wegovy is called semaglutide. Novo says that it produces all of
the API for Wegovy at its facilities in Denmark.
FILL-FINISH
Novo has hired Catalent CTLT.N , a large U.S. contract drug
manufacturer, to fill injection pens for Wegovy at two of that
company's plants: in Brussels and in Bloomington, Indiana.
Novo has also hired another U.S. firm, Thermo Fisher
TMO.N , as a Wegovy pen filler. That company is performing the
work at its factory in Greenville, North Carolina.
It has said it will sign up a third by the end of the year
but has not identified the company. Thermo is converting a
building that makes tablets and pills at the Greenville site to
do sterile fill-finish work instead, a company spokesperson told
Reuters last week.
ASSEMBLY AND PACKAGING
At its most recent capital markets day, in March 2022, Novo
said it assembled and packaged Wegovy at its own facilities.
In September, Reuters reported that Novo had hired U.S.
private company PCI Pharma Services to handle some assembly and
packaging of the drug.
Assembling the pens after a glass cartridge is filled with
Wegovy is the final stage of manufacturing before it is shipped.
COMPONENTS
The Wegovy injection pens for the U.S. market slightly
differ from those sold in the European markets including Norway,
Denmark, Germany and UK, where it has so far launched.
The pen for Europe uses the so-called FlexTouch device and
contains four doses per pen, instead of one in the U.S. pen.
Both pen devices contain a number of components. They
include, depending on the device: a glass cartridge or a glass
syringe, a pre-filled plastic pen, a needle shield, and a rubber
plunger.
Swiss medical technology company Ypsomed YPSN.S in
September announced a long-term supply deal with Novo for
autoinjectors, another component contained in the pens.
Several large companies have said they are making these
components for companies manufacturing injection drugs from the
GLP-1 receptor class to which Wegovy belongs.
These companies include West Pharmaceutical Services
WST.N , Stevenato Group SpA STVN.N , Gerresheimer GXIG.DE
and SCHOTT Pharma 1SXP.F .
(Reporting by Maggie Fick
Editing by Josephine Mason and Tomasz Janowski)
((maggie.fick@thomsonreuters.com; +44 7890 916706;))