The Secret Ozempic Recipe Behind Novo’s Race to Boost Supplies
The pharma giant needs more semaglutide, the key ingredient in its diabetes and weight-loss drugs. So it’s spending $8 billion to expand a plant in rural Denmark where the magic happens.
Michael Hallgren, senior vice president of active pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing, at Novo Nordisk’s factory in Kalundborg, Denmark.
Photographer: Nanna Navntoft/Bloomberg
Michael Hallgren, the almost 7-foot-tall Dane tasked with boosting Novo Nordisk A/S’s production of the key ingredient in Ozempic, needs a car to navigate the sprawling factory complex rising on what were once fields of grain outside Kalundborg, a former fishing village of 16,000 people in central Denmark. Once Hallgren is inside—clad in a construction hat and neon vest it takes him a few minutes just to cross one of the company’s massive halls lined with two-story steel vats for drug ingredient production. The facility is scheduled to start churning out medicine next year, but Novo has said it doesn’t know when it will be able to satisfy global demand for Ozempic and its sister drug, obesity medicine Wegovy.
After vastly underestimating the demand that would exist for weight-loss drugs, the company is playing catch-up with an eight-year, more than $8 billion expansion project that’s due to finish in 2029 at the Kalundborg site. Novo is battling US drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co. for the lead in the booming market for the pound-shedding meds. The longer it takes Hallgren to scale up ingredient production, the more sales Novo risks losing, either to Lilly or to the compounding pharmacies that are supplying copies of Wegovy, thanks to a US regulatory loophole that allows them to provide a version of the drug as long as it’s in shortage.