By Michael Erman
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 12 (Reuters) – Pfizer is getting ready for a shopper marketplace for weight problems medication on par with the booming enterprise it noticed after it launched erectile dysfunction drug Viagra in 1998, CEO Albert Bourla stated on Monday.
Bourla stated that even when the drugmaker was negotiating its buy of weight-loss drugmaker Metsera, initially introduced in September 2025, Pfizer didn’t count on the cash-pay marketplace for weight problems medication presently dominated by Eli Lilly and Co and Novo Nordisk to get so massive, so quick.
“Each Lilly and Novo offered their gross sales and had vital gross sales exterior the reimbursement system. Mainly, exterior the U.S., we have been calculating very restricted gross sales,” Bourla stated, talking to a gaggle of reporters in the course of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Convention in San Francisco.
“Now we see that this operates nearly like Viagra, the place folks have been prepared to pay and purchase it, though it was not reimbursed in any respect.”
Pfizer developed and offered Viagra, which is now offered largely as a generic drug, for years, however spun off the enterprise that controls the model in 2020.
Pfizer has stated it doesn’t count on to return to income progress till 2029, as it really works to develop new blockbuster medication, together with the weight problems therapies it picked up within the $10 billion acquisition of Metsera.
The corporate introduced earlier on Monday that it plans to launch 10 totally different part 3 research of weight problems compounds from Metsera by the tip of the yr, together with one it launched in November. It purchased Metsera for as much as $10 billion after profitable a bidding warfare towards Novo.
“We’re all in on weight problems,” Bourla stated. “We invested. We have now good experience in industrial, good experience in improvement and good experience in discovery.”
Pfizer has stated it expects the subsequent few years to be bumpy, because of the expiration of patents on key medication, decrease gross sales from its COVID-19 enterprise and value cuts promised to the U.S. authorities.
It was the first main pharmaceutical firm to signal a cope with the Trump administration to decrease the value of its prescribed drugs within the Medicaid program in alternate for 3 years of tariff aid.
Bourla stated the federal government offers, which require drugmakers to supply their new medicines on the similar value within the U.S. as abroad, will assist corporations put stress on European nations to extend what they are going to pay for medication.
“Do you cut back the (U.S.) costs to France’s stage or cease supplying France? You cease supplying France,” Bourla stated. “So they are going to keep with out new medicines … as a result of the system will drive us not to have the ability to settle for the decrease costs.”
(Reporting by Michael Erman; Enhancing by Jamie Freed)
