Eli Lilly has become the first drugmaker to have their GLP1 weight loss drug approved for use in China, beating top competitor Novo Nordisk to the second largest pharmaceutical market in the world.
Lilly’s market leading pill, orforglipron (Foundayo), will now compete against its own once-weekly GLP-1 weight-loss injection and rival injectable drugs from Novo, Pfizer and Innovent Biologics in the Chinese market that, until now, has never offered oral weight loss management.
The GLP-1 drugs work by mimicking a gut hormone that suppresses appetite and helps to regulate blood sugar in patients.
Following a recent surge in the drugs’ popularity, which are becoming increasingly more accessible to patients through online telehealth companies, the WHO estimates that around 100 million people worldwide take GLP-1 agonists.
In the US, the largest global market for the them, oral therapies account for about a third of obesity prescriptions following the rollout of Novo’s Wegovy pill there in January this year.
Lilly’s entry into the Chinese market could attract patients who are reluctant to commit to injectable versions of the medications and give it an edge over their primary competitor Novo.
Novo has already applied to sell an oral version of its flagship GLP-1 Wegovy in China, alongside companies pitching experimental GLP-1s including Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals and Huadong Medicine, but Lilly has beaten them all to approval.
According to China’s National Health Commission, the proportion of people who are obese or overweight in the country could rise by a quarter by 2030 to 65% of the population.
In line with the increase, GLP-1 sales are also expected to rocket, with some analysists predicting they could reach 30bn yuan ($4.5bn) in the next five to seven years – up from an estimated 3 to 4 billion yuan at present.
The approval is the latest in a string of successes for American multinational Lilly and follows a deal it struck last week to make its obesity medicines available directly through telehealth firm Him & Hers.
In October, its investigational medicine retatrutide outperformed rival Ozempic (semaglutide) from Novo in a phase 3 trial involving adults with type 2 diabetes, strengthening the company’s next generation cardiometabolic pipeline.
Lilly’s shares rose around 2.8% in US premarket trading on 12 November following news of the Chinese approval, reinforcing its position as the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company.
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