Drugmaker Novo Nordisk said it is halting its agreement with telehealth company Hims & Hers after less than two months, citing deceptive marketing and the selling of knock-off versions of its blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy.
The company in April announced it would be partnering with Hims & Hers as well as other telehealth companies to sell Wegovy at a reduced cost of $499. The telehealth companies sold cheaper compounded versions of semaglutide—the active ingredient in Wegovy— while the Food and Drug Administration said the drug was in shortage.
The end of the collaboration means Hims will no longer be able to sell branded Wegovy drugs, and will no longer have direct access to Wegovy through the company’s NovoCare Pharmacy arm.
When FDA declared the shortage over, compounding pharmacies were legally restricted from making and selling compounded versions of the drug by May 22.
Novo Nordisk on Monday said Hims wasn’t adhering to the law, accusing the company of continuing to sell compounded versions of its drug “under the false guise of personalization.”
“We will work with telehealth companies to provide direct access to Wegovy that share our commitment to patient safety – and when companies engage in illegal sham compounding that jeopardizes the health of Americans, we will continue to take action,” Dave Moore, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president of U.S. operations, said in a statement.
Hims & Hers has invested heavily in compounded weight loss drugs, even advertising in a 60-second Super Bowl commercial, drawing some scrutiny and criticisms.
In a statement posted on social media, Hims CEO Andrew Dudum said Novo was “misleading the public.”
He said Novo’s commercial team has been pressuring his company to steer patients to Wegovy “regardless of whether it was clinically best.”
“We refuse to be strong-armed by any pharmaceutical company’s anticompetitive demands that infringe on the independent decision making of providers and limit patient choice,” Dudum said, adding Hims will continue to offer access to “a range of treatments, including Wegovy.”
When the partnership was first announced, Novo Nordisk said it wanted to shift patients from using “knock-off, compounded versions” of Wegovy to the FDA approved version.
During FDA-declared shortages, pharmacists can legally make compounded versions of brand-name medications, selling copycat versions of the drugs at a much lower cost. But the FDA doesn’t approve compounded drugs, and branded manufacturers argue they aren’t safe.
In a statement Monday, Novo Nordisk said it launched an investigation that found the active ingredients in the weight loss drugs sold by telehealth entities and compounding pharmacies are manufactured by foreign suppliers in China.
The company also cited a Brookings Institute report which found that a large share of those Chinese suppliers were never inspected by the FDA, and many that were inspected had drug quality assurance violations.
