Pharmaceuticals and Obesity Drugs

Telehealth company Hims & Hers announced it will launch a compounded oral semaglutide pill positioned as a cheaper alternative to Novo Nordisk’s newly released Wegovy tablet, offering it to U.S. patients at an introductory $49 for the first month and then $99 per month versus Novo’s $149 list price. Novo Nordisk blasted the Hims product as an 'unapproved, inauthentic, and untested knockoff' of Wegovy’s active ingredient and vowed to take both legal and regulatory action to protect patients, its intellectual property and the FDA approval system. Hims is exploiting a gray zone in federal pharmacy law that allows customized compounded versions of brand‑name drugs when they are in shortage or tailored to an individual prescription, even after FDA declared GLP‑1 shortages over in 2024 except for personalized dosing. The move comes despite a September FDA warning letter accusing Hims of falsely implying its compounded GLP‑1 drugs were equivalent to FDA‑approved products; in Thursday’s rollout materials Hims concedes its pill has not been approved or evaluated for safety or quality by the agency. Novo Nordisk’s U.S.-traded shares fell more than 8% after the announcement, underscoring how the telehealth firm’s aggressive GLP‑1 strategy is rattling investors and intensifying an already heated fight over the safety, legality and pricing of off‑brand semaglutide offerings that have flooded social media and online clinics.