No­vo Nordisk’s block­buster GLP-1 prod­ucts Ozem­pic and We­govy are among the next 15 drugs sub­ject to the gov­ern­ment’s Medicare ne­go­ti­a­tion pro­gram un­der the In­fla­tion Re­duc­tion Act, fol­low­ing re­peat­ed calls from law­mak­ers to make the treat­ments more af­ford­able.

The list came weeks be­fore the gov­ern­men­t's dead­line, kick­ing off a new cy­cle that’s slat­ed to take place un­der the in­com­ing Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion. To­geth­er, the 15 drugs cost Medicare Part D about $41 bil­lion from No­vem­ber 2023 through Oc­to­ber 2024.

Com­bined with the first 10 drugs sub­ject to Medicare ne­go­ti­a­tions, the 25 drugs ac­count­ed for 36% of Medicare Part D spend­ing dur­ing the same pe­ri­od.

Fol­low­ing the poor­er-than-hoped per­for­mance of Ca­griSe­ma last month, No­vo Nordisk need­ed an em­phat­ic clin­i­cal suc­cess with its high-dose ver­sion of We­govy. The obe­si­ty drug did not quite man­age one.

A tri­al as­sess­ing the high-dose form of the in­ject­ed GLP-1 met its pri­ma­ry end­point, the com­pa­ny said Fri­day — but the weight loss fell short of that seen in a tri­al of Eli Lil­ly’s ri­val prod­uct Zep­bound. No­vo’s shares NVO dipped 4% in ear­ly trade as in­vestors con­sid­ered the da­ta, as well as ques­tions around man­u­fac­tur­ing and pric­ing.

No­vo said that pa­tients giv­en high-dose We­govy for 72 weeks lost 20.7% of their body weight. Tri­al sub­jects giv­en the ap­proved We­govy dose lost 17.5%, and place­bo pa­tients saw a weight re­duc­tion of 2.4%. These fig­ures were based on a per-pro­to­col analy­sis, which elim­i­nates pa­tients who did not ad­here to treat­ment.

Plus, news about Neur­i­zon:

WuXi AppTec di­vests again: The com­pa­ny is sell­ing its US med­ical de­vice test­ing op­er­a­tions, in­clud­ing fa­cil­i­ties in Min­neso­ta and Geor­gia to medtech con­sult­ing firm NAM­SA, ac­cord­ing to a Fri­day re­lease. No fi­nan­cial de­tails were dis­closed. Last month, WuXi AppTec al­so