Black Edge@BlackEdgeFund
Eli Lilly slips as obesity scripts said to trail those for Novo’s Wegovy.
Eli Lilly $LLY fell in premarket trading after Bloomberg reported that weekly prescriptions for the company’s weight loss therapies, Foundayo and Zepbound, trailed those for Novo Nordisk’s $NVO rival drug, Wegovy, according to IQVIA $IQV data sourced by analysts.
Cantor analyst Carter Gould noted that total prescriptions for Zepbound for the week ending April 17 fell ~2% from the prior week, while those for Novo’s (NVO) Wegovy injectable rose 7% for the same week.
“We see slower TRx (total prescriptions) growth continue in the injectable segment across diabetes and obesity, though injectable Wegovy notably grew +7% w/w,” Gould noted.
As for Lilly’s (LLY) newly launched oral obesity therapy Foundayo, the total prescriptions for the once-daily therapy reached 3,707 for the week ending April 17, its first full week on the market, according to IQVIA data cited by Truist analyst Srikripa Devarakonda.
In comparison, Novo’s (NVO) Wegovy pill recorded roughly 18,410 prescriptions during the first week of its launch in January. Devarakonda stopped short of making conclusions based on only one week of launch data reported by IQVIA.
However, “we acknowledge that investors will be scrutinizing the numbers, and believe that Foundayo scripts totaling just 20% of what oral Wegovy achieved during their first full week could cause the stock to be weak today," the analyst added.
