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It is a Super Bowl Enigma.
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 | source: sherwood |
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Last night, millions of people stared at "LX" and quietly Googled what it meant.
LX. |
A quick refresher for anyone who needed it: L is 50, X is 10 — which makes Super Bowl LX simply Super Bowl 60. |
The small lesson in that moment is useful: the things that look simple often aren't. |
Which brings us to today's story:
So… about what happened in healthcare today. |
While we were still digesting the Super Bowl weekend, Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk sued Hims & Hers, accusing the telehealth company of infringing a key patent on semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. |
The stock screen told part of the story: |
Hims ( ▼ 16.03% ) shares were down roughly 20% premarket. Novo ( ▲ 3.63% ) initially popped nearly 6%, before giving some of that back.
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Hims has built a big part of its business inside a legal gray zone and now that gray zone is being tested in court. |
Which raises a bigger question we'll come back to:
When does "disruption" turn into "infringement"? |
And that's where today's story begins. |
When A Blockbuster Meets A Copycat |
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For three years, Novo Nordisk looked untouchable.
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Wegovy and Ozempic turned weight loss into a trillion-dollar market. Semaglutide became a household word. At one point, Novo even became Europe's most valuable company. |
Then January hit — and the story started to wobble. |
→ Novo warned that 2026 sales could fall by as much as 13%.
→ Pricing pressure in the U.S. intensified.
→ Eli Lilly kept gaining ground.
And the patent clock quietly grew louder in the background. |
That's when Hims & Hers decided to test the guardrails. |
Last week, Hims rolled out a $49-a-month copy of Novo's brand-new Wegovy pill — just days after the FDA approved it.
Novo's version? $149. |
In plain English:
Hims tried to beat Novo to consumers with a much cheaper version of a drug that had barely even reached the market. |
The reaction was immediate. |
→ Novo's stock sold off.
→ Hims' stock whipsawed.
And regulators suddenly got very interested. |
Within hours, the FDA said it would take "decisive steps" against illegal copycat GLP-1 drugs.
By Friday, HHS had referred Hims to the DOJ.
By Saturday, Hims pulled the pill.
By Monday, Novo filed a lawsuit. |
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Here's the part most headlines skipped.
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→ Making a GLP-1 injection is hard.
→ Making a GLP-1 pill is much harder. |
Your stomach is basically designed to destroy proteins like semaglutide, so simply putting the drug in a tablet doesn't work. To get around that, Novo spent $1.8 billion to buy Emisphere Technologies and its SNAC coating — a proprietary system that protects the drug long enough for it to be absorbed. |
That took years of trials, specialized technology, and real clinical data. |
Hims took a different route. Its pill relied on "liposomal technology," but there's no publicly available human trial data backing it — mostly just animal studies. One expert even said the approach amounted to "quasi-clinical trials on people." |
In short:
→ Novo engineered a proven way to make semaglutide work as a pill.
→ Hims tried to engineer a cheaper workaround — and crossed its fingers that regulators would look the other way. |
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The Loophole That Made This Possible |
So how was Hims able to do this in the first place? |
It comes down to a regulatory loophole. |
When a drug is officially in shortage, specialty pharmacies are allowed to "compound" — meaning they can legally make customized versions for patients who can't access the branded product. In 2024, GLP-1 drugs were in short supply, and Hims built a significant part of its business around that gap. |
Even after the shortage ended, the company continued selling what it called "personalized" versions. |
That argument was already shaky for injectable drugs. For pills, it's even weaker — tablets are produced in batches, not tailored to individual patients. |
Novo has been frustrated for months that regulators didn't move sooner.
Now, they finally are.
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This Isn't Just NOVO vs. HIMS
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At its core, this fight isn't really about two companies. |
It's about three forces colliding in the same market. |
→ On one side are patents — Novo's legal moat and the foundation of its power.
→ On another is price — Hims' appeal to consumers who want cheaper, easier access.
And overseeing it all is regulation — the referee that ultimately decides what's allowed. |
If Novo prevails, it keeps its pricing power and tight control over the GLP-1 market.
If Hims prevails, it opens the door to cheaper alternatives and chips away at Big Pharma's dominance. |
Markets already started pricing both possibilities last week. |
Novo erased much of its post-Wegovy gains.
Eli Lilly continued to pull ahead with stronger guidance.
And Hims got hit hard — but in doing so, it demonstrated just how massive the demand really is. |
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The math was simple.
Hims: $49 per month.
Novo: $149 cash-pay. |
Consumers loved it. Investors flinched. Novo moved. |
Today, Novo sued Hims over its copy of Wegovy — not just the pill, but potentially its injectables too. |
What looks like a pricing battle is really something deeper: |
If cheaper copies are allowed to scale, Novo's blockbuster economics weaken.
If regulators shut them down, access shrinks and prices stay high. |
That's the tension at the heart of this fight. |
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