By Josh Nathan-Kazis

The drugmaker Novo Nordisk has landed a solid blow against Hims & Hers Health, as Novo looks to recapture the patients it lost to companies selling legal knockoff versions of its weight-loss drug Wegovy.

Novo Nordisk said Wednesday it will sell Wegovy at lower prices to uninsured patients and to patients whose insurance doesn't cover the medicine, through its own online pharmacy.

The announcement comes weeks after the Food and Drug Administration declared that Wegovy is no longer in shortage. That means Hims will have to stop selling its copycat version of Wegovy in the coming months, and will largely shift its weight-loss offerings to older generic pills.

Hims sold $225 million worth of its Wegovy knockoff last year, and wants to parlay that into a durable weight-loss medicine business over the coming years.

If the new Novo Nordisk offering makes Wegovy cheaper and easier to access, it could sharply limit the number of patients willing to settle for the less effective pills Hims will be limited to offering.

Hims stock slid 4.3% early Wednesday, while Novo's American depositary receipt rose 3.6%.

Novo Nordisk said its new pharmacy will sell Wegovy for $499 a month. While that's more than the $165 a month price point at which Hims continues to advertise its copycat version, it marks a significant discount to Novo's list price of $1,350 a month.

The initiative matches a similar Eli Lilly program that sells its competing weight-loss drug Zepbound to uninsured patients. Zepbound's official shortage ended in December. Lilly's program prices the lowest dose of Zepbound at $349 a month, and higher doses at up to $699 a month. It delivers Zepbound in single-dose vials that patients need to draw and inject themselves.

The Novo Nordisk pharmacy, however, is selling the same single-dose auto-injector pen that patients would receive if they bought Wegovy through traditional drug channels.

The end of the official Wegovy shortage brings a dramatic reordering of the weight-loss landscape. In early 2024, Hims and its peers launched a veritable gold rush in the knockoff weight-loss drug market, as compounding pharmacies and telehealth storefronts scrambled to offer their own compounded versions of Wegovy and Zepbound.

Now compounding pharmacies are no longer allowed to manufacture Lilly's Zepbound in bulk, and must stop manufacturing Wegovy in bulk by the end of May.

The rise of the compounders unsettled shares of Lilly and Novo Nordisk, as they crystallized worries that the enormous sales estimates for Wegovy and Zepbound -- on which the tremendous valuations of the two companies rest -- might be overly optimistic.

That raises the stakes as the shortages end, and patients begin to look for alternatives for the compounded versions on which they had been relying. If Novo Nordisk and Lilly can capture those patients with their new lower-priced online pharmacy offerings, it could help reassure investors that sky-high sales growth estimates remain on track.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com

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March 05, 2025 10:56 ET (15:56 GMT)

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