Novo Nordisk's Ozempic pill fails in long-shot Alzheimer's effort

Novo Nordisk A/S said a pill version of Ozempic failed to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in a pair of large studies that were seen as a long-shot effort to open up a new use for blockbuster obesity drugs.

Patients who took the drug didn’t see their disease progress more slowly based on a cognitive assessment, the Danish drugmaker said on Monday (November 24). Novo will discontinue a planned one-year extension of the studies.

Novo shares plunged as much as 12.4% in Copenhagen, hitting the lowest level since July 2021. Their value has more than halved this year amid investor concerns over Novo’s long-term competitiveness in obesity, a booming market it helped create.

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"It was a lottery ticket that could have had great value,” said Per Hansen, investment economist at Nordnet AB. "Investors hadn’t assigned it any real value. Still, the hope was there." Shares of rival Eli Lilly & Co. also fell in premarket US trading, while Biogen Inc., which has been developing different Alzheimer’s drugs, was up 6.7%.

Alzheimer’s, which brings devastating cognitive decline, memory loss and personality change, is a notoriously difficult area of drug development, and Novo had consistently described the trials as high risk. Yet the potential reward was also huge: success could have brought as much as $5 billion in extra annual revenue, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

"We felt we had a responsibility to explore semaglutide’s potential,” Novo Chief Scientific Officer Martin Holst Lange said in a statement, using the generic name for Ozempic. The treatment resulted in improvement of some physiological measures linked to Alzheimer’s, though that didn’t translate into slower worsening of the disease.

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The Danish drugmaker is struggling to regain its leading position in obesity. Any evidence that Wegovy has an effect on the most common form of dementia could have given it a competitive advantage against US rival Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound.

The company told analysts in September that it anticipated the Alzheimer’s studies could detect as little as a low-teens percentage difference in the progression of cognitive decline. The pair of trials followed more than 3,500 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease. They had about a 75% probability of failing, Morgan Stanley analysts estimated before the results.