Weight loss wars: a century on, the battle heats up

America’s Eli Lilly is locked in a fight with Denmark’s Novo Nordisk to control the weight loss market. One product could hold the key.

Eli Lilly could be the first $US1 trillion pharma company. Bloomberg

Oliver Barnes

Oct 8, 2024 – 11.51am

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Times are good at Eli Lilly. Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for weight-loss drug stocks looks set to turn the company into the world’s first $US1 trillion drugmaker by market value.

But war stories about gloomier times are never far away when you run a pharmaceutical company. In the late 2000s, Eli Lilly’s share price neared all-time lows as patents of its blockbuster psychiatric drugs – chief among them Prozac, Zyprexa and Cymbalta – expired.

Financial Times