The rivalry between the two pharmaceutical giants that dominate the market for weight loss medicines intensified Wednesday when one of the companies announced it’s teaming up with a Boston startup.
Novo Nordisk, the century-old Danish company behind such blockbuster GLP-1 treatments as Wegovy for obesity and Ozempic for diabetes, said it has signed a deal with Vivtex, which specializes in developing oral alternatives to drugs administered by injections. The partners may develop more GLP-1s or another class of medicines.
Vivtex is a spinout founded eight years ago by three MIT scientists, including the renowned inventor and Moderna co-founder Robert Langer and two of his onetime mentees, Giovanni Traverso and Thomas von Erlach. Von Erlach is the chief executive of the startup.
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