Pfizer wins 'fantastic deal' after $10B obesity drug fight with Novo Nordisk
Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla joins 'Mornings with Maria' to discuss the company’s $10 billion acquisition of obesity drug startup Metsera, its competition with Novo Nordisk and his plans to expand their weight-loss drug pipeline.
Pfizer Inc. is doubling down on the booming weight-loss drug race, with CEO Albert Bourla declaring the company will be a "formidable competitor" after securing a $10 billion deal to acquire obesity-drug developer Metsera.
"Pfizer, when it plays, plays big, and we will, as we did in COVID, as with Lipitor, as [with] Viagra, with all the medicines that we have invented and brought to the market, we will do the same with obesity," Bourla said Thursday on "Mornings with Maria."
The deal allows the pharmaceutical giant to secure the rights to new weight-loss treatments still in trials, entering a space already crowded with popular GLP-1 drugs like Eli Lilly's Zepbound and Novo Nordisk's Wegovy.
Pfizer expects to have its first weight-loss treatment on the market by the end of 2028, a move that could position it to capture a share of what Bourla called a "huge" market, estimated at approximately $150 to $200 billion.
PFIZER WINS $10B BIDDING WAR FOR OBESITY DRUG DEVELOPER METSERA IN MAJOR PHARMACEUTICAL ACQUISITION
A woman injects a GLP-1 injection into her stomach in this undated photo taken at an undisclosed location. (iStock / iStock)
The Metsera deal followed a months-long back-and-forth between Pfizer and Novo Nordisk, which were both bidding for the company.
Bourla said Pfizer acquired a "very good portfolio" from Metsera, and will continue building on its own to become a "formidable competitor" in the space.
The pharmaceutical giant, which has its own direct-to-consumer platform PfizerForAll, is aligning with the Trump administration’s push to lower prescription drug prices, coordinating on the White House’s forthcoming TrumpRx platform designed to give Americans more direct access to medications without relying on traditional insurers or middle-men.
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Various packages of the weight-loss drug Wegovy from the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk lie on the sales counter in a Danish pharmacy in Kopenhagen, Denmark on June 28, 2023. GLP-1 drugs have boomed in popularity in recent years due to their abi (Steffen Trumpf/picture alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)
"I think the TrumpRx that he just spoke about is a wonderful opportunity for Americans to receive medicines at a fraction of the cost," Bourla said.
"That is going to create a very positive momentum, and a lot of patients who were abandoning their prescriptions at the pharmacy because they couldn’t afford them — now they will, so we will have more medicines in the hands of patients, and a healthier America."
Bourla said the company will integrate drugs with the TrumpRx initiative to streamline access to medications.
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"We will be able to have a complete website with all the 40-plus products that we are going to include in this TrumpRx," he shared.
"It's going to be ready by December so, when TrumpRx is launched, it will be able to send immediately those that they log into that website, to our website, so that we can take care of all of the logistics."
