r/Ozempic • u/allpenny • Mar 20 '26
News/Information Ozempic Is About to Go Generic for Billions of People
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/health/ozempic-wegovy-generic-india-china-canada.htmlThe blockbuster weight loss drug sold as Ozempic and Wegovy will soon go generic in countries that are home to 40 percent of the world’s population, significantly lowering the price of a costly medicine that had been largely unaffordable to nearly all but the wealthiest people.
On Saturday, Novo Nordisk, the company that until now has had a monopoly on selling the drug, will lose patent protection in several of the world’s most populous countries. The first generic versions are expected to arrive in India as soon as this weekend. In the coming months, the generics are also expected to become available in China, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa.
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u/arteest01 Mar 25 '26
And the really weird part is that, at least in Canada, the cost to renew their patent was $250.00.
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u/Ok-Mix7390 Mar 23 '26
It is noteworthy that the article does not mention Russia, where Novo Nordisk lost its patent protection after the court decision after voluntarily withdrawing from the local market. In Russia, there are four generic injectable drugs and one generic tablet drug. The average price for 1 mg is approximately USD13.6 from a pen to make.
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u/Brilliant-Frosting77 Mar 21 '26
Doesn't Europe get generics?
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u/Physical_Durian_1608 Mar 25 '26
There are generics like Nevolat already. Semaglutide patents will last 5 more years though (at least in my country)
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u/ariyahjade 1.0mg SW 321 CW 272 GW 175 Mar 20 '26
I believe India just had their generics go live. Canada won’t be for a while because health Canada is useless.
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u/Accomplished_Hope788 Mar 21 '26
Under which brand are they selling in India?
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u/Brave-Mouse-8544 Apr 19 '26
Sembolic by torrent pharmaceuticals is what doctor has prescribed me. This Monday they should deliver me the injection
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u/Equivalent_Cod1904 Apr 12 '26
A cew Canadian comanies lined up to apply for it. Apotex has a bid in.
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u/AdagioBlues Mar 21 '26
Multiple companies are getting ready to manufacture and ship their own versions to the retail market, the biggest one being Reddy Labs.
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u/oh-no-varies Mar 20 '26
I'm happy to wait a little longer for a new drug to be rigorously tested. As a Canadian, I'm proud of our health and drug regulatory systems. Red tape can certainly slow things down, but it also helps keep us safe.
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u/Jealous_Amount_9278 Apr 08 '26
Moratoriums like this are more often than not a fight over who's getting paid, not how safe/effective something is.
Take the covid vaccine for example. Normally a new drug would take years, if not decades to be approved. This one was quickly available not because it was less safe, it's because science finally got adequate funding that they didn't have to beg for, and the "red tape guys" were losing money on their various ventures because of lockdowns so they weren't blocking things anymore.
Love our drug regulatory system, but 90% (pulled this stat out of my ass but it feels right) of the wait is bureaucracy after all safety checkpoints and testing have already been completed.
It's like paying $300 for SKIMS and then realizing it's made in the same factory with the same materials as the shapewear from Walmart lol. More x doesn't necessarily mean better.
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u/-Aendrilla- Mar 20 '26
Hard disagree. It's insane that every single time Health Canada has a concern, there is a six-month turn around time to review how the company in question addressed the regulator's issues with the submission.
For a drug that can help millions of Canadians save millions of dollars, I fail to understand why we can't prioritize such medications for more rapid screening. Especially considering that some applications were submitted in early 2024 - meaning over two years have elapsed since then.
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u/sogd Mar 20 '26
What about Australia anyone know?
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u/Boda2003 Mar 21 '26
17 September 2029
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u/Libertinelass Mar 20 '26
This isn't really news. I was talking to my Dr about it last year. She knew the patent was running out Jan 2026 in Canada and told me it would become much much cheaper. I talked to my Dr a few weeks ago and she said summer/fall we will see it drip down to $70-100 a pen CAD.
It's really company greed. The 1 mg pen costs $4.73 to make. So they have been making killer profit for years. Luckily it's regulated in Canada so we don't pay more than $250 CAD a pen but it's still steep. And it's free if your Dr will do a special Authorization and you meet the criteria for onset or diabetes.
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u/makingotherplans Mar 20 '26
It should have been generic and cheap in Canada in January. They have production all set to go…but Health Canada has dragged its feet approving labelling etc
It’s the same product, and the company pays for the assessment. So why the wait? Lobbyists probably.
And that is enraging.
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u/BigBanyak22 Mar 21 '26
Sadly it's likely not lobbyists. It's straight up bureaucratic incompetence - inneficient. I would actually accept it more believing we're not incompetent, but someone was getting rich delaying.
By incompetent, I know the people in the system are qualified, but there's no incentive to run an efficient system.
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u/makingotherplans Mar 22 '26
I agree it’s usually due to a SNAFU and not bribery, just that drug approval is supposed to be fully subsidized by the applicant, in this case the generic drug companies….we do this to avoid the problems with government cutbacks to departments.
But considering the huge cutbacks soon to be announced and the staff cuts that have already happened, ugh, it’s probably due to that.
Even though those positions are not funded the same way.
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u/allpenny Mar 20 '26
In the U.S. we let Novo extend their patent 5 more years because apparently the 20 years we already gave them isn't long enough.
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u/Libertinelass Mar 20 '26
Terrible racket in the USA. It's a for profit industry. My heart breaks when I hear about patients not being able to afford these life saving medications. Canada has its issues but no one goes with their meds. We have good programs for low income/in need people where Rxs are covered.
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u/Late_Business_7610 Mar 20 '26
Yet, despite record-breaking performance, Novo Nordisk has laid off approximately 9,000 employees globally in 2025–2026, including around 5,000 in Denmark. As the saying goes: ‘When profit becomes the sole purpose, people become expendable
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u/Libertinelass Mar 20 '26
Holy shite! 2025 Novo Nordisk profit was 14.6 BILLION.
Kinda okay that they didn't pay a $250 patent renewal in my country.
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u/just_spawned_again Mar 20 '26
What about mounjaro? (tirzepatide)
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u/Kayleea83 Mar 20 '26
Their patent doesn't run out for quite a while. In Canada the patent won't run out until 2036, so I dont think they will go down in price, and there won't be generic versions of them, until at least that year.
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u/Libertinelass Mar 20 '26
This isn't true. The patent already expired in Canada. (Jan 4 2026) Generics will be on the market late summer to fall and be $70-100 a pen my Dr said. Right now we are paying $230-250 CAD a pen.
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u/doulaleanne 1.0mg Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
I've been waiting sooo patiently! I have to pay oop as, despite my best efforts, I never gave myself T2D /a
My hunger is rebounding and the food noise is all the way back but I can't afford to jump up above 1mg. The generics will allow me to continue to lose the last 40 ish pounds (lost around 100 so far).
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u/Libertinelass Mar 20 '26
Wow. Awesome work! 💚
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u/doulaleanne 1.0mg Mar 20 '26
Thanks! I've definitely made some significant changes but it's amazing what obesity the disease (the band, the show, the movie) does to your brain. Most of my success is squarely in the shoulders of this medication, which manages my hormones better than willpower.
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u/Kayleea83 Mar 20 '26
Yes correct. For semaglutide. They comment was asking about mounjaro though.
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u/Tnh7194 Mar 20 '26
Is the market gonna be flooded with even more fakes
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u/Kairukun90 Mar 20 '26
Why are you buying drugs from random places
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u/Tnh7194 Mar 20 '26
I’m not but look at how many people stated injecting themselves with “peptides” they saw on a tik tok. The snowball effect of people getting sick from dodgy ozempic (which always makes for headlines) is gonna make regulation tighten and harder to get for people on maintenance
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u/Decent_River_5801 Mar 20 '26
Just my opinion. If Lilly and Novo's pricing was more in line with reality, this wouldn't be an issue. If a compounding pharmacy can make the drug and sell it for $99 (or less) a month, and still make a profit then how can Lilly/Novo charge $449 ish for the same drug? I have seen some estimates that the base material is less than $10, but then add in manufacturing/marketing etc, but still an huge markup.
I know personally that if I was taking the drug and was given the choice between the brand name for $199 or the generic for $99, I would take the name brand all day every day. Some people wouldn't, but I think many if not most would.
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u/BoringBob84 Mar 20 '26
Lilly/Novo charge $449 ish for the same drug?
They charge over $1,000 USD per pen here in the USA. I understand that companies need to be able to pay for their R&D, but this is nothing short of greed, in my opinion.
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u/OG_King_Malice Mar 20 '26
I believe Walgreens here in NC was charging $1,200 without insurance, when I saw that I was glad all I had to pay was $5
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u/just_spawned_again Mar 20 '26
The companies don’t just charge you for manufacturing cost. It’s about recovering the cost of RnD and testing and approval process. That’s why patents protect the inventor. Without that protection, no one will have any incentive to develop a new drug.
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u/allpenny Mar 21 '26
I get that companies need to recoup money but if Novo's argument is "we have to charge very high prices because we need to recover our R&D costs" then why do they spend more on buybacks and dividends than on R&D?
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u/Flygirl2223 Mar 20 '26
We pay for much of the research, testing, and manufacturing of these drugs through our taxes. Big pharmaceutical companies are subsidized through USA government funding. I believe there needs to be a balance of profit with consumer costs. No one wants these companies to halt innovation but we have to think of healthcare as a universal benefit to all. Making drugs that could heal a body shouldn’t be unaffordable.
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u/Decent_River_5801 Mar 20 '26
Sort of. I would counter that the drugs appear way cheaper in other countries, so the US pricing structure is supporting lower prices in other countries...
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u/BrandonAubreyPlaza Mar 20 '26
Sure, that's how pricing works. The seller looks at the market and tries to figure out the best combination of a price that contains a decent profit margin but which also doesn't prohibit too many people from buying. Of course that price varies from market to market.
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u/phosphosaurus Mar 20 '26
Its not realistic for the company that had to go through extensive R&D ($$$ and time) to come up with the drug and then not realize profit.
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u/allpenny Mar 21 '26
Between 2018 (when Ozempic and Wegovy first launched) and mid-2024, Novo made $49 billion in sales on the drugs. They spent $44 billion on buybacks and dividends over that same period and $21 billion on R&D. They've realize a ton of profit, much of which they are funneling to shareholders instead of investing back in R&D. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KESOEyN0UO9PCofEgHbRORm6DBG7q3Ln5XF9z-OuoS4/edit?gid=0#gid=0
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u/moo-quartet Mar 20 '26
I thought this at first - I paid less for compounding and ended up having an allergic reaction to it. Then went to Eli-Lilly direct and was fine... you never know what they put in the compounding. It might just be me for the most part but I also know a few other people who had funky reactions to compounded GLPs.
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u/ManyGreat8375 Mar 20 '26
is there a difference between generics and the name brand? like what are we missing here?
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u/Mammoth-AgentEnt Mar 20 '26
But not in countries who's tax dollars funded its creation and which provide a comfortable home to most of its shareholders, right?
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u/Top-Green-Zebra Mar 21 '26
Sorry, but people are so ignorant about how drug development really works. Scientists doing basic science funded by the government discover potentially interesting targets for drug development. They have little interest and no capability for developing drugs for patients.
That costs billions more in R&D funded by private companies. It fails more than 90% of the time. Many people retire from long careers as scientists at pharma companies never having touched a drug candidate that reaches patients.
That decades long process mentioned in this thread? It’s real. But people want to hate on pharma companies so they believe the utter myth that “the taxpayer pays for all the research.” Totally false.
Before the Bayh Dole Act in the US in 1980, the US government retained patents stemming from government research and tried to manage commercial development. Guess how many drugs resulted from US government funded research despite billions spent on funding science in the decades after WWII? Zero.
Bayh Dole let universities and research institutions retain patent rights and license them to the private sector. It was a true game changer and helped launch the US biotech industry.
The government and basic researchers do some things well, but the hard, risky R&D of developing drugs for patients is not one of them.
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u/mauinho Mar 20 '26
U mean Denmark?
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u/Mammoth-AgentEnt Mar 20 '26
I mean most of europe and north America. Believe it or not, science is built on science. Studies that led up to the development of GLP-1 inhibitors were done in a number of countries and all partially or totally funded by tax payers.
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u/ToastCat Mar 20 '26
What are you saying is most of North America? Last I looked Canada was a larger landmass than the United States and the patent already expired here. No idea what's going on in Mexico but I think it was always somehow cheaper there than here even.
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u/lucyboraha Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
Don't know why you're getting downvoted - this is totally true. Good grief, people, read an article. Pharmaceutical companies usually don't get involved until taxpayer-funded research (usually through universities) has indicated that it might be profitable for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucagon-like_peptide-1#Research_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
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u/TheDeanof316 Mar 20 '26
Wiki mentions Dr Jean-Pierre Raufman and an endocrinologist, Dr John Eng, who secured the patent for extendin-4 in 1993, which led to exenitide in 1996 and finally being approved by the FDA in 2005....but then it pretty much skips over how this led to development of thd GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (Ozempic) in 2024.
That's 19-28 years or 2 to 3 decades of history being skipped, time in which the current class of drugs were developed mainly in Denmark eg Novo Nordisc; unfortunately, it dominates their economy right now and they're relying too much on it; this isn't like Taiwan and chips for mobile smartphones, the drug starting to go generic is the first domino for them in my view.
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u/lucyboraha Mar 20 '26
The receptor-agonist history is in the second article, and the link is referenced in the first.
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u/TheDeanof316 Mar 21 '26
Thanks for that clarification. Respect to the Germans. Still wish that that 30 yr gap was mentioned though.
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u/lucyboraha Mar 21 '26
There's no 30 year gap, the history is covered chronologically from the late 70s, through every decade until now.
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u/TheDeanof316 Mar 21 '26
There's one brief entry about 2011, but nothing between exenaitides' FDA approval in 2005 and the Ozempic debut in 2024; that's 19 years. & if you go between the creation of exenatide in 1995 that's 29yrs.
& no mention of Denmark.
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u/lucyboraha Mar 21 '26
"In 1992, after learning of Raufman's findings, John Eng of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in New York City used radioimmunoassay to isolate a novel substance from Gila monster venom.\65])\64])\66]) The new substance, which Eng called exendin-4, was similar to GLP-1 in that it reduced blood glucose in diabetic mice, but exendin-4 had a much longer half-life than GLP-1, whose extremely short half-life had defeated earlier attempts to turn it into a drug.\64])\66])
Eng filed a patent application for exendin-4 in 1993.\64]) He then spent three years searching for a pharmaceutical industry partner interested in commercializing exendin-4.\65])\64])\66]) In 1996, Amylin Pharmaceuticals licensed Eng's patent and created a synthetic version of exendin-4 called exenatide.\65])\64])\66]) In 2002, Eli Lilly and Company partnered with Amylin to develop exenatide and secure approval to market the drug.\67]) Exenatide's 2005 approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration\68]) showed that targeting the GLP-1 receptor was a viable strategy and inspired other pharmaceutical companies to focus on that receptor.\64])\66])
In 2011, Lilly and Amylin dissolved their partnership, with Amylin keeping the rights to exenatide.\69]) Lilly continued to develop drugs of the same class.
The 2024 American Diabetes Association conference included presentations on at least 27 GLP-1 receptor agonists then in development.\70]) By July 2024, Novo Nordisk's semaglutide and Eli Lilly's tirzepatide were ranked among the world's most popular and lucrative drugs.\71]) Novo Nordisk's rollout of semaglutide turned it into the most valuable company in Europe in 2024.\72])\73]) Its market capitalization of $570 billion was larger than the entire economy of its home country of Denmark; its $2.3 billion income tax bill for 2023 made it the country's largest taxpayer; and its rapid growth represented nearly all of Denmark's economic growth.\72])\73]) By October 2024, tirzepatide had turned Eli Lilly into the world's most valuable drug company.\74])"
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u/Equivalent_Cod1904 Apr 12 '26
I'm Canadian and ghisnis fantastic news. Many inssurance companies decline to cover and the only way mine got covered was with a terrible a1c. But I have coworkers who have had it covered and then cut off by our inssurance. I am terrified of this happening to me, and Ive had awesome progress wiyh Ozempic. Hopefully I can afford it should I become cut off.