Keep fake obesity drugs out of employees' veins: Lilly execs

Drug makers, employers and others need to work together to protect workers from imitations of GLP-1 agonists and other new weight control drugs, according to executives from Eli Lilly and Company.

Executives from the Indianapolis-based drug maker, made that plea Thursday, during a conference call with securities analysts.

An analyst asked Lilly executives about reports that desperate patients are coping with shortages buying poorly made imitations of tirzepatide, the GIP and GLP-1 agonist that powers Lilly’s injectable Zepbound medicine, from compounding pharmacies.

Zepbound is one the drugs competing with GLP-1 agonists and GIP and GIP-1 agonists like Wegovy and Saxenda for the money of patients who want name-brand weight-loss drugs.

Compounding pharmacies make custom medications for patients with special needs.

Lilly has obtained samples of the imitation tirzepatide and analyzed them in its labs, Dan Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, said.

“What we’ve found, for the most part, is that this isn’t compounded tirzepatide at all,” Skovronsky said. “Our drug is not available to compounders. Rather, they’re purchasing other chemicals entirely, or doing business with fake producers of tirzepatide.”

The fake tirzepatide “is often full of impurities, and sometimes contaminated by bacteria,”  Skovronsky said.

Related: Cigna aims to manage the GLP-1 spending panic

Dave Ricks, Lilly’s chief executive officer, said one problem is that regulatory standards make increasing production of genuine Zepbound difficult.

“It’s a little odd that the answer to that constraint, which is about raising the standards of the industry for a sterile product, is to create another industry that has a non-sterile product,” Ricks said.

The solution

“The real thing to address is increasing the insurance coverage and increasing the supply,” Ricks said. “We need to work primarily with the government and employers to expand coverage, so obesity medicines are affordable.”

Lilly and competitors also have to work harder to expand manufacturing capacity, Ricks said.

But he predicted that most new players who are not already in the game will have a tough time breaking into the GLP-1 market.

“The volume is really high in this category,” Ricks said. “It will probably end up being one of the highest-volume categories in the history of the industry. Making things on a $1 billion scale takes time, is technically difficult and is capital-intensive.’

What it means

For employers and brokers, the implications are grim: In addition to finding ways to pay for obesity-fighting drugs that, according to one forecast, could double health care spending in the United States, health plans may need to wrestle with the threat posed by fake obesity-fighting drugs.