No­vo bets on swift FDA re­view for oral di­a­betes drug semaglu­tide

The world’s top di­a­betes drug mak­er No­vo Nordisk is in a hur­ry. As part of its fourth-quar­ter re­sults on Fri­day, the com­pa­ny $NVO said it was plan­ning to use a pri­or­i­ty vouch­er to has­ten the FDA re­view process for its po­ten­tial block­buster oral GLP-1, semaglu­tide, a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the Dan­ish drug­mak­er’s long-term growth strat­e­gy.

The com­pa­ny has spent near­ly a cen­tu­ry lean­ing on its ros­ter of in­jectable di­a­betes treat­ments, but as com­pe­ti­tion heats up and pric­ing pres­sure in the Unit­ed States in­ten­si­fies, No­vo is bet­ting on a pill to en­tice pa­tients who are averse to in­jec­tions or those who haven’t so far re­quired in­jec­tions to man­age their in­sulin lev­els. An es­ti­mat­ed 425 mil­lion peo­ple glob­al­ly suf­fer from di­a­betes, ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al Di­a­betes Fed­er­a­tion.

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