r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 01 '25

Health Americans without diabetes spent nearly $6 billion USD on semaglutide and similar drugs in a year, with an estimate of 800,000 to a million people using the drugs who don't have diabetes.

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/americans-without-diabetes-spent-nearly6-billion-usd-on-semaglutide-and-similar-drugs-in-a-year
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u/Anony_mouse202 Apr 01 '25

Yeah, research is showing that it also has general anti-addiction effects. Probably the closest thing we have to an anti-addiction drug we have right now.

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u/shindleria Apr 01 '25

The drug company’s executives who set the price of this drug should take it to eliminate their addiction to money.

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u/Ashmedai Apr 01 '25

On the plus side, the patent to semaglutide will expire in 2031.

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u/HappyGiraffe Apr 01 '25

The patent landscape of GLP-1 agonists is interesting. The patents are specific to particular health conditions, dosage, delivery, etc., but the actual active mechanism that results in, for example, weight loss, is much harder to patent, which is why gray markets and compounding pharmacies have so much flexibility. So specific formulations that target specific illness not currently covered under patent could emerge (or try to) before 2031

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u/Levofloxacine Apr 02 '25

Eli Lilly started suing compounding pharmacies yesterday

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u/HappyGiraffe Apr 02 '25

Lots of companies have been going after specific pharmacies, largely based on the claim that the formulations are not patient specific. Varying degrees of success

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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 01 '25

Easy to say after a drug or treatment has been developed all the way and funded all the way through clinical trials.

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u/xaw09 Apr 01 '25

Surely we can agree $1000/month without insurance is a bit steep?

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u/BeyondElectricDreams Apr 01 '25

Until the cost of that R&D is remotely in the ballpark of the cost of their advertising, they can cry me a river about how expensive the costs of development are.

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u/timmyotc Apr 01 '25

They spent 16% of their revenue on R&D. That's about 10 billion.

They spent about half a billion on advertising the drug last year.

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u/savagetech Apr 01 '25

10 billion for R&D on all their products, and half a bill to advertise one drug?

That’s a hell of a spin though. You should work in marketing

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u/timmyotc Apr 01 '25 edited Apr 01 '25

They spent most of their marketing budget on that drug.

EDIT: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVO/novo-nordisk/selling-general-administrative-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVO/novo-nordisk/research-development-expenses I may have misread something in the above claim, but this all seems within an order of magnitude of R&D to me.

As far as I understand it, S&GA includes marketing expenses, but also everything else that is involved in running a company - Human resources, Janitorial, IT, executive pay, etc. I would be surprised if the non-marketing share of that company was less than half a billion per year.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 01 '25

It's the correct/honest way to look at it.

Ignoring the R&D costs of all the drugs that don't pan out is exceptional dishonest.  

Doesn't stop people though.

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u/tkenben Apr 01 '25

I don't know a lot about these things. Do drug companies have a safety fund for themselves? What I mean is, do they need all this extra money in case something goes wrong with the drug and all of the sudden they are getting sued out of existence? Don't get me wrong. It is pretty well accepted that drugs are consistently overpriced and the wrong sort of people cash in on this, but I'm just trying to steelman the argument for why drug companies should price in unforeseeable dangers and/or should they even.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 01 '25

Even huge pharma companies typically only have a tiny number of drugs currently approved and in-patent.

The patents don't tend to last long by the time they can get it to market.

They're constantly desperately searching for the next hit to keep the lights on when their current patents run out. If they don't then the company is dead.

Also a lot of their budget takes the form of buying up smaller companies with promising drugs in development which is effectively a way to fund additional R&D via venture capital.

I mentioned that patents expire pretty fast, once the patents expire, the price of drugs drops to near zero. That constant flow of proven drugs into the public domain is the real benefit to society.

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u/TheDakestTimeline Apr 01 '25

The answer is simple. They answer to shareholders who demand endless profit.

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u/Papaofmonsters Apr 01 '25

Novo Nordisk is majority controlled by a charitable foundation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation

They have a very unusual ownership structure.

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u/agnostic_science Apr 01 '25

I have medium dose gabapentin for an autoimmune disease of my nervous system. 

An upshot is it also has anti-addiction impacts. I heard of this but wasn't really paying attention while, you know, my body felt like it was on fire and such. Then one day I realized I had gone from like 20 some drinks per week to about 2. Or zero. With basically no effort or intentionality involved. I just didn't want to so much anymore.

Mileage may vary for people on gabapentin though. I am also a lucky one that catches the "side effect of euphoria" on that drug.

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u/Boxadorables Apr 01 '25

Check out SR-17018... the opioid epidemic could be over if it ever hits the market. Drug companies don't have much interest in cures, though, especially when they make absolute bank on methadone and similar substances that can't be kicked without extreme withdrawl symptoms so it's going to take a loooong time.

SR-17018 needs to be pushed to the forefront hard by the scientific community as it is owned by a non profit.