Vivtex cofounders Robert Langer (L) and Giovanni Traverso (R)<\/p>\n
Vivtex<\/p>\n
Ozempic has been a household name for less than half a decade, but it and other GLP-1 drugs are already a blockbuster pharmaceutical category, estimated<\/a> to reach $150 billion globally by 2030. Between 15-18 million Americans are expected to be taking one by the end of the year, and up to 40 million by the end of the decade, according to analyst firm Jefferies. <\/p>\n The GLP-1 market is still dominated by Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk and Indiana-based Eli Lilly, which makes competitor drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound. Last month, Novo put a pill version of its obesity drug Wegovy on the market, which already has nearly 250,000 prescriptions in just five weeks. Lilly has its own oral obesity drug on the way, expected to be approved by the FDA in the second quarter.<\/p>\n As the race for this segment continues, Novo Nordisk announced Wednesday that it has entered into an agreement with Boston biotech startup Vivtex, which helps companies make oral versions of injectable drugs, to help it develop next-generation pills for obesity and diabetes. The deal is worth up to $2.1 billion in upfront and milestone payments, plus royalties for any commercialized medicines developed. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re excited about it,\u201d Vivtex cofounder (and Forbes Innovator 250 listmaker<\/a>) Robert Langer told Forbes, adding that it\u2019s gratifying to \u201ctake the discoveries we make and get them out to patients.\u201d<\/p>\n The stakes are high for Denmark-based Novo Nordisk. Although it pioneered the GLP-1 space, Wall Street expects it to lose its market lead to Lilly by the end of the year. Its stock is down more than 24% this year, most recently falling by double digits after a clinical trial<\/a> of its newest obesity drug, CagriSema, found it underperformed rival Lilly\u2019s Zepbound. It also lost a high-profile bidding war for obesity biotech startup Metsera to Pfizer. <\/p>\n Novo still has the lead in pill versions of obesity drugs. These are expected to capture a large segment of the patient population, both because they don\u2019t involve needles and because their production costs are lower. The pill version of Wegovy shows better long-term weight loss<\/a> than Lilly\u2019s rival version, Orforglipron, which is still several months away from hitting the market. <\/p>\n Seeking out next generation oral GLP-1s could help the company maintain its competitive edge. That\u2019s in part because clinical trials of both Lilly\u2019s and Novo\u2019s drugs found higher levels of side effects than their injectable counterparts, which will likely lead patients to shop around as more alternatives become available. (Because patients tend to gain back around 75% of their weight 18 months after stopping the drugs, Wall Street doesn\u2019t expect a long-term drop off of customers.)<\/p>\n That\u2019s where Vivtex comes in. Cofounded in 2018 by Langer and fellow MIT scientists Giovanni Traverso and Thomas von Erlach, the startup works with customers like Orbis Medicines and Astellas Pharma to develop pill versions of \u201cbiologics\u201d\u2014large, complex medicines like GLP-1s that are usually given to patients with an IV or injection. It\u2019s difficult to make pill versions of these drugs, Traverso said, because they \u201care just like the things we eat,\u201d so the body is primed by evolution to degrade them. That means when a drug is delivered to the body, only a tiny fraction ends up being absorbed, often too small to have a therapeutic effect.<\/p>\n Plates like these enable Vivtex to run hundreds of experiments at once.<\/p>\n Vivtex<\/p>\n To improve this, Vivtex has developed a “gastrointestinal system on a chip\u201d\u2013small pieces of pig GI tissue that can be subjected to an automated lab setup. This enables Vivtex to conduct thousands of experiments a day, Langer said, which can be analyzed by machine learning to help scientists find ideal chemical formulations for pill versions of drugs. <\/p>\n The company\u2019s AI systems, Langer said, can use the results of those experiments to help predict even better-performing formulations, enabling the company\u2019s scientists to quickly iterate to better-performing drugs. \u201cOn certain molecules we have been able to increase the absorption by a factor of over a hundred,\u201d he said. The process is \u201cso much faster that it would almost never happen otherwise,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n By partnering with Vivtex, Novo Nordisk aims to use the company\u2019s platform to quickly move new versions of obesity drugs out of the injectable category and into pills. The more Vivtex improves those drugs\u2019 absorption, the less expensive they will be to manufacture, meaning Novo will be able to compete on both price and features, potentially keeping its lead in the market. <\/p>\n MORE ON FORBESForbesOzempic And Wegovy Prices Will Be Cut By Up To 50%, Drug-Maker SaysBy Mike Stunson<\/a>ForbesHow A Wall Street Analyst Started A $4 Billion Obesity Drug CompanyBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesA ‘Holy Grail’ Sleep Apnea Pill Could Be On The Market Next YearBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesWhy Lilly And Novo Nordisk Will Keep Dominating The Market For Blockbuster GLP-1 DrugsBy Alex Knapp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vivtex cofounders Robert Langer (L) and Giovanni Traverso (R) Vivtex Ozempic has been a household name for less…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[271],"tags":[16325,3335,272,3102,16182],"class_list":{"0":"post-24873","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-novo-nordisk","8":"tag-forbes","9":"tag-glp-1","10":"tag-novo-nordisk","11":"tag-ozempic","12":"tag-robert-langer"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}