According to a senior business executive, Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk plans to introduce its popular weight-loss medicine Wegovy to India in 2026 after receiving regulatory licences and guaranteeing there is a sufficient supply to fulfil demand.

In the most populated nation on earth, where obesity rates are high, particularly among women, there is a large market opportunity for the medication. Wegovy is already being marketed through online stores in illegal imitation form.

“I think there would be quite a lot of patients and quite a lot of doctors who would be interested in this therapeutic area,” said Novo Nordisk’s India Managing Director Vikrant Shrotriya.

“It will open up a new horizon for healthcare itself, because till now the horizon was only limited to alternative therapies and bariatric surgery, right?”

He cautioned patients against purchasing knockoffs of Wegovy since they can be harmful.

“They should not take it,” Shrotriya said in an interview. “It is not licensed. For most of these products, we also do not know any kind of a cold chain and how it has been insured during transportation.”

The active component of Wegovy, semaglutide, is covered by a patent held by Novo in India, although the company has not yet taken legal action against copycats.

“We have not been able to take legal action because we have not been able to catch them,” Shrotriya said, adding that while the illegal sellers were “difficult to trace”, the company had not seen any large syndicates selling the drug in India.

On the cost of Wegovy in India, he refrained from remark. For a monthly supply, Novo costs around $1300 in the United States and about 300 euros ($317) in Germany.

“When it comes to Wegovy, we have to see the ecosystem at that point of time in 2026,” Shrotriya told Reuters, adding that the company would price it “to justify the innovation but also work for access in India”.

In a time when the prevalence of obesity worldwide is at an all-time high, Wegovy, a weekly injection, is the most successful weight-loss treatment to date.

The medication, along with Novo’s diabetes medication Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, is a member of a group of treatments known as GLP-1 receptor agonists that delay digestion and give patients the feeling of being full for a longer period of time.

Wegovy helped individuals lose roughly 15% of their body weight, according to clinical testing. A sizable study also shown that treating obesity has clear cardiovascular advantages.

Wegovy was originally made available by Novo in the US in 2021, and it has since been made available in a number of European nations, including the UK and Germany.

To fulfil the demand in such countries, it has struggled to make enough Wegovy, and it has stated that it is unlikely to sell the drug there for a very long time.

Demand in India might be substantial. According to data from a National Family Health Survey for 2019–2021, the prevalence of abdominal obesity in India was determined to be 40% in women and 12% in males.

According to Shrotriya, Novo wants to be ready to meet the demand.

“When we launch in a country, we want that the continuity of the supply is there,” he said.

Some people have doubts regarding the timing of Wegovy’s launch in India.

“A bigger market is always a developed market because of getting high realisation, so I believe India should not be a priority for them,” Nirmal Bang’s lead pharma analyst Mitesh Shah said, adding that Wegovy’s popularity in India was “dependent” on its price.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)