Healthy Returns: Novo Nordisk’s head of research and development previews the first-ever obesity pill

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We're inching closer to having the first-ever needle-free weight loss drug.

That's thanks to Novo Nordisk, which expects a U.S. approval for its daily pill for chronic weight management by the end of this year. The company expects to launch it in early 2026. 

The drug is the 25-milligram oral version of semaglutide, the active ingredient in the Danish drugmaker's popular weight loss injection Wegovy and diabetes counterpart Ozempic.

Several drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk's chief rival Eli Lilly, have been racing to develop obesity pills, which may help alleviate the supply shortfalls and issues accessing the injections on the market. Pills are likely easier to manufacture than injections, and some health experts hope they could be cheaper. 

It may be too soon to say which pill will win the greatest share of the market. But one thing is clear: Novo Nordisk's drug will have a head start. 

Novo Nordisk's Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Scientific Officer, Martin Holst Lange, sat down with CNBC to preview the company's pill. 

On the advantages of the pill: 

Lange touted the pill's "unsurpassed" weight loss, safety and tolerability profile. 

The pill helped patients lose up to 16.6% of their weight on average at 64 weeks, according to results from a late-stage trial presented at a medical conference in 2024. That weight loss was 13.6% when the company analyzed all patients regardless of whether they stopped the drug.

The weight loss appears to be in line with the injectable version of semaglutide (Wegovy), and slightly higher than that caused by an experimental pill from Eli Lilly in a separate phase three trial. 

"I think the data speaks a little bit for themselves," Lange said. 

Lange later said some of the company's competitors expect their pills to be less effective than their injectable drugs, but "that's clearly not the case" for Novo Nordisk. 

He also pointed to the "substantially lower" rates of patients who discontinued the treatment due to side effects, when compared to competing drugs. But Lange said to take comparisons "with a grain of salt" since no head-to-head trials directly pit Novo Nordisk's pill against other drugs. 

About 6.9% of patients discontinued oral semaglutide due to side effects, which were mainly gastrointestinal, compared to around 5.9% of those who took a placebo. 

Meanwhile, 10.3% of patients who took the highest dose of Eli Lilly's pill stopped treatment due to side effects, compared with around 2.6% of people in a placebo group. 

Lange also said Novo Nordisk's pill could have a cardiovascular health benefit. That's because semaglutide – particularly Wegovy – is the only injection on the market with an established and approved cardiovascular benefit. 

Novo Nordisk last week said Wegovy cut the risk of heart attack, stroke or death by 57% versus Eli Lilly's weight loss injection Zepbound in a real-world comparison of the rival medicines in patients with obesity and cardiovascular diseases but not diabetes. 

In a separate phase three trial called "SOUL," Novo Nordisk's oral semaglutide lowered the risk of cardiovascular-related death, heart attack and stroke by 14% compared to a placebo after four years on average in patients with diabetes and established heart disease, with or without chronic kidney disease.

On the pill's dietary requirements: 

Novo Nordisk's pill is a peptide medication, while competitors like Eli Lilly's treatment are small-molecule drugs.

That means patients need to take Novo Nordisk's oral semaglutide in the morning on an empty stomach with no more than four ounces of plain water. They're instructed to wait 30 minutes before eating, drinking or taking other oral medicines. Some analysts previously told CNBC that those dietary requirements could be a hurdle for certain patients. 

But Lange called that "a theoretical concern" and pointed to evidence showing that it is "not a true limitation." For example, he said patients were treated with the pill for up to five years in the placebo-controlled SOUL trial and "even in that setting, we did not see this as a limitation."

"Patients take that drug apparently without this limiting their life," Lange said. "I think that's a matter of, you get up in the morning, you take the tablet, then typically you take a shower, you go to breakfast and then, very quickly, half an hour is gone." 

On how pills will fit in the obesity market: 

Lange said injections don't appear to be "a major obstacle" to people taking obesity treatments, but acknowledged that there are some patients who don't like needles or have other reasons for not wanting an injectable drug. 

Novo Nordisk wants to be able to reach those people. 

"If there's a big group of people who prefers an oral over an injectable, we want to deliver that," he said. "We prefer to deliver that, again, with the same efficacy and safety profile." 

He said he can also envision patients starting on an injectable and switching to another form of treatment to maintain their results: "You could switch to an oral, you could switch to a lower dose, you something that gives fewer [gastrointestinal side effects]."

Lange said that ability to transition to different treatments has to be proven in a phase three trial, but "based on what we've seen so far, that is that optionality in our portfolio." 

He highlighted other oral and injectable drugs in Novo Nordisk's pipeline, including amycretin. That treatment targets the same gut hormone that Wegovy mimics, known as GLP-1, as well as a pancreas hormone called amylin that affects hunger. Late-stage trials on amycretin will begin next year, Lange said. 

On meeting demand with supply: 

Over the last few years, injections from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly slipped into supply shortages due to skyrocketing demand. Those treatments are no longer in short supply, and Wall Street and the health and medical community hope that pills won't encounter the same issue. 

Lange said producing enough of the drug to meet demand is "obviously key to us," as Novo Nordisk wants to ensure that patients can continue their treatment. He said the company is confident in being able to scale up manufacturing of the treatment.

Lange pointed to the company's investments in increasing production capacity over the last several years. That includes a new manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and a deal to buy three Catalent manufacturing sites from Novo Nordisk's parent company, Novo Holdings. 

Lange said those investments will help with the supply of injectables, but "it certainly also goes to the oral active ingredients that are actually being produced in the U.S." 

Feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Annika at annikakim.constantino@nbcuni.com.

OpenAI is doubling down on health care innovation. 

In a post on LinkedIn Tuesday, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil announced he is creating a new initiative within the company called "OpenAI for Science." The artificial intelligence company will hire a small team of academics to build "an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery," Weil said.

"Paired with a small team of researchers, we want to prove that AI models are ready to accelerate fundamental science—and accelerate research all over the world," Weil wrote. 

OpenAI for Science will not exclusively work on health care, but Weil shared several examples of how AI has been used to accelerate health-related and biological research in recent months. He mentioned Google DeepMind's AlphaFold, which predicts the structure that proteins fold into, as well as OpenAI's work with Retro Biosciences, among other examples. 

"Scientific discovery improves everything from the quality of our daily lives to national security to global GDP," Weil said in the post. "Innovation is the reason the US leads the world. Few domains hold as much promise for improving lives as science."

The new scientific initiative comes after OpenAI touted GPT-5 as the "best model yet" for health-related queries. GPT-5, which rolled out last month, is OpenAI's latest and most advanced large-scale AI model.  

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said a post on X health-related questions are one of the biggest categories of usage for its ChatGPT chatbot. 

GPT-5 is designed to proactively flag health concerns, ask relevant questions and generate more precise and reliable responses, OpenAI said in a blog post. Altman said in his X post that he hopes GPT-5′s health capabilities will "provide real service to people."

"Health care is maybe the area where there's the strongest improvement of any category," Altman told CNBC's "Squawk Box" in an interview last month.

Feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Ashley at ashley.capoot@nbcuni.com.