(Reuters) – Eli Lilly launched an ad campaign on Friday, cautioning patients against the risks of unapproved weight-loss drugs in its latest attempt to fend off competition from copies of its weight-loss drug.
The ad, asking patients to “be a healthy skeptic”, was released soon after a commercial from telehealth firm Hims & Hers’, selling a compounded weight-loss drug, premiered at the Super Bowl.
WHY IT MATTERS
The ad is aimed at unproven and sometimes counterfeit products sold online and elsewhere, which claim to offer weight-loss benefits.
But it also marks the latest in a public back-and forth between weight-loss drugmakers and companies selling compounded versions of the drugs, whose sales are permitted when the original drugs are in short supply.
Hims, which offers compounded versions of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, drew criticism from some lawmakers for omitting safety information about the customized medicines in their advertisement.
Novo had released an ad earlier this month asking patients to “check before you inject”.
“Before anything goes into your body, be skeptical of what’s in it, be skeptical of where it comes from, be skeptical of who oversees its production,” said Lilly’s ad.
CONTEXT
Compounding facilities create medicines by combining, mixing or altering drug ingredients. While federal regulations allow compounded versions to be sold to meet demand if a drug is in short supply, these drugs are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo’s Wegovy were recently removed from the U.S. FDA’s shortage list, which means that compounding pharmacies selling hundreds of thousands of doses of the drugs are running out of time to produce them.
Novo and Lilly have also sued several medical spas and compounding pharmacies for selling products claiming to contain their respective drugs, semaglutide and tirzepatide.
(Reporting by Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)
