In just a few years, Hims & Hers Health Inc. reached almost $1 billion in sales by making it easy to buy cheap, generic versions of popular drugs such as Viagra. Now it’s using that playbook to jump into the hottest part of health-care: weight-loss shots.
And in typical fashion, a big part of the company’s pitch is the discount. Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk A/S, costs roughly $1,350 for a month of injections without insurance, and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound is similarly priced.
Hims said it’s offering a treatment with the same active ingredient as Wegovy for $199 a month. That undercuts Big Pharma by as much as 85%. This will help customers access these drugs without “navigating the shortages and costs that are currently limiting access to the branded medications,” Hims said in a press release.
The company’s stock shot up as much as 38% on Monday, the biggest intraday move in more than three years. Hims can offer the prescription weight-loss drugs because US regulators have rules that allow pharmacies to make copycat versions of drugs in shortage, a practice that’s known as “compounding.” This exists to make drugs available when manufacturers can’t produce enough to meet demand or when a pharmacist needs to tweak a drug’s recipe to remove an ingredient that might cause an allergic reaction in some people, for example.
Compounding of weight-loss drugs has exploded as Lilly and Novo have failed to keep up with demand for the new drugs. Yet there’s litt.