| |  | Questions With… | I spoke with Doustdar on Monday to find out more about the company’s strategy with GLP-1 marketing and development. Here are the key takeaways from my interview: 1. Expanding online access to its GLP-1 offerings is a key part of Novo Nordisk’s growth strategy. Novo also has partnerships with Amazon Pharmacy and telehealth platform Ro, in addition to offering the medications directly to patients through its own direct-to-consumer platform. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Doustdar said that Hims & Hers “has been quite successful in attracting a lot of patients to their platform and sites, and they have been a gateway [for] these patients procuring medications. We have been saying that we would like to meet the patients where they are.” The renewed agreement with Hims & Hers “is giving us yet another avenue to do our strategy of making these GLP-1s … [get] into more hands faster.” 2. Novo Nordisk is still looking to extend its reach further into the diabetes and obesity market. “We see the obesity market and diabetes market as a very large unmet need. [It’s] a market that is not homogeneous but heterogeneous in terms of patient populations,” Doustdar said. He mentioned the different needs patients have — including those who want to lose a lot of weight, and those who only want to only drop a handful of pounds. → He also mentioned medications meant to treat diseases linked to diabetes and obesity, pointing out efruxifermin, a drug in late-stage clinical trials that helps treat fatty liver disease. Novo acquired the medication, still in development, when it bought Akero Therapeutics last year in a deal worth up to $5.2 billion. “Our job as a focused company on diabetes and obesity is to go very deep and make sure that we — within the areas we operate in — cater to all the patients,” Doustdar said. 3. Novo Nordisk is focused on its internal pipeline of drugs in this category but is open to more acquisitions. Operating in just a few, targeted disease treatment areas, Doustdar tells me, means that the company has to “push [itself] to have the highest number of assets internally, but also review any asset externally” to see where there are complementary product lines from other companies. “We’re doing both.” Some of Novo’s pipeline product highlights are: In the near term: Doustdar said Novo Nordisk plans to soon bring to market an even higher dose of Wegovy, the GLP-1 meant for weight loss, that he said rivals results from competitor Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. Testing showed that patients who stuck with the higher 7.2 mg dose of Wegovy for 72 weeks lost 21 percent of their starting weight. A third dropped 25 percent of their weight. Those results are in line with results found with higher doses of Zepbound. → The company is also working on CagriSema, a weight loss medication that pairs semaglutide with a long-lasting synthetic version of amylin, a hormone the body releases after eating that helps control appetite and blood sugar. It’ll be the first amylin-related product on the market, Doustdar said. For those who only want to lose a smaller amount of weight — and have fewer side effects that GLP-1s are known for — the company will also be releasing a version that’s just the synthetic amylin, called cagrilintide, he said. In the longer term: There are the next wave of drugs that target three hormones — instead of one or two — in the gut to treat obesity and diabetes: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. One of these “triple G” medications being tested by Novo Nordisk is known by its experimental name, UBT251. People in clinical trials lost nearly 20 percent of their body weight on the drug, and Novo is also planning to try another version that mixes in the synthetic amylin as well, Doustdar said. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly has its own “triple G” medication, called retatrutide, in development that has spurred people to lose nearly 29 percent of their starting body weight. | 
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