Drugmaker Novo Nordisk is taking action to curb the massively popular compounded semaglutide industry, which provides copies of its blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to patients—often for much lower prices.
The Danish pharmaceutical company is lobbying the US Food and Drug Administration to add semaglutide to the agency’s Demonstrable Difficulties for Compounding (DDC) lists, which would block compounding pharmacies from producing dupes of the drug. In a filing posted by the agency on Tuesday, lawyers for Novo Nordisk reason that semaglutide belongs on these lists “due to the complexities associated with their formulations,” among other reasons.
“These drugs are inherently complex to compound safely,