The India link in blockbuster weight loss drug Ozempic's success

The Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk’s India team is the secret sauce behind its blockbuster medicine Ozempic. The team was instrumental in the drug’s dramatic ascent to prominence as a semaglutide-based diabetes treatment.

Not only has the Danish economy benefited from the success of Ozempic and Wegovy, two more weight-management medications based on semaglutide, but Novo Nordisk’s market capitalization has surpassed Tesla’s.

The business conducted a separate study program after learning about the advantages of weight management through its investigation into novel diabetes medications. Dawber said the business was taken aback by the amount of demand for these products.

The Bengaluru-based teams of Novo Nordisk Global Business Services (GBS) have worked together with international teams to support the Ozempic program. According to Dawber, the Bengaluru team works closely with the headquarters on pharmacovigilance, global safety, clinical trials, biostatistics, and data management related to the semaglutide medication. At the moment, it has 4,000 workers.

Dr. Prasanna Kumar T S, VP of global safety in Novo Nordisk GBS, said the role of the biostatistics unit in Bengaluru, which conducts all statistical analysis and reporting for Ozempic.

According to Dawber, biostatistics is a fairly specialized field that pharmaceutical corporations typically maintain extremely close to the corporate office.

“We have a team of 150 biostatistics experts in Bengaluru. The vice president who heads that function also heads the biostatistics team in Denmark and in the US. Something very highly technical like biostats, we have the global leadership sitting here, and they manage teams here and in other geographies,” he told the media.

According to Kumar, the global medical affairs (GMA) team was essential to the creation of semaglutide. Through investigator-initiated research, the global medical affairs team has also played a crucial role in producing evidence and advancing our understanding of semaglutide. According to him, the global safety team in Bengaluru is in charge of keeping an eye on Olympic safety as well as evaluating and disclosing unfavorable incidents. They assist in the creation of publications, dossiers, manuscripts, safety update reports, revisions to investigator brochures, clinical risk management strategies, and publications.

With ambitions to hire 1,400 individuals over the next two years, Novo Nordisk is hiring physicians, pharmacists, statisticians, data engineers, AI specialists, and health economists in India.

A considerable decline in the company’s attrition rates, from 16% to 18% to little over 7%, was seen by Dawber, suggesting that the majority of recruiting is for new positions rather than replacements. Dawber anticipates that Ozempic won’t be available in India this year or the next, despite its success.

“The dilemma we face is that the demand for the product currently exceeds our ability to supply, which is frustrating for us and, of course, frustrating for patients. However, we propose to manage this by carefully staging the launches, ensuring we never launch in a country and then find that the demand is too great, forcing us to stop. Such a scenario would be a huge tragedy for the patients and would damage our reputation. While India is a phenomenal market for Novo Nordisk, accounting for about 4% or 5% of our global sales and being the third biggest market in the Asia-Pacific, we will not launch in India until we can be sure that we can guarantee supply,” Dawber added.