Lawsuit alleges Lilly, Novo locked up telehealth to kill compounded GLP-1s

Strive Specialties, one of the largest compounding pharmacies in the country, accused Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk of locking up telehealth companies they partner with in an effort to cut off businesses like them from the GLP-1 market.

Telehealth is one of the primary ways patients access weight-loss medications. Novo and Lilly have partnerships with companies like Ro, Weight Watchers, and LifeMD to distribute branded versions of their weight-loss drugs.

According to Strive, those partnerships bar those telehealth companies from working with compounders, which make bespoke or “personalized” versions of Lilly and Novo’s patented drugs — often for lower prices than the branded version sold by the drugmakers. The drugmakers have argued compounders simply mass-produce copies of their patented drugs with unnecessary tweaks.

“These agreements limit both prescriber choice and patient access to the medications that would most benefit the individual patient,” Strive said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The lawsuit cites Novo’s short-lived partnership with Hims & Hers. Novo abruptly called off the deal with Hims because it continued to sell compounded versions of its blockbuster weight-loss shot, Wegovy. (Hims contracts with Strive to fulfill some of its prescriptions.)

Novo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Lilly called Strive’s lawsuit “an attempt to shift focus away from its own conduct.”

Lilly sued Strive last year, accusing it of false and deceptive online marketing. That lawsuit was dismissed in October after a judge said it did not have jurisdiction to sue in Delaware. Lilly refiled the suit later that month in Arizona, where Strive is based.

Compounders like Strive were supposed to stop mass-producing copies of GLP-1s earlier this year once the FDA no longer classified the drugs as being in a shortage, but some continue to advertise “personalized” or “microdosed” versions that are, in theory or in practice, slightly different than the meds the big drugmakers sell. They are also significantly cheaper than branded drugs, though Novo and Lilly have slashed their cash-pay prices to make the drugs more accessible.

At the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference this week, Novo CEO Mike Doustdar estimated that around 1.5 million US patients are using compounded versions of the company’s drugs.

“It’s not because this 1.5 million patients like to have unsafe, knock-off versions of our products,” he said Monday. “They [compounders] grabbed a part of the consumers that simply were price-sensitive to the whole thing.”