Eli Lilly releases new, cheaper form of weight loss drug

Eli Lilly on Tuesday released a new form of its weight loss drug Zepbound for roughly half its usual monthly list price to reach millions of patients without insurance coverage for the popular injection, such as those with Medicare. 

The move also aims to expand the supply of Zepbound in the U.S. as demand skyrockets, and to ensure eligible patients are safely accessing the real treatment as cheaper copycat versions gain traction. 

The company is now offering 2.5-milligram and 5-milligram single-dose vials of Zepbound for $399 per month and $549 per month, respectively, through its direct-to-consumer website. Patients typically start treatment with a 2.5-milligram dose, gradually increase the amount and later take so-called maintenance doses to keep the weight off.

The list prices of Zepbound and other popular weight loss drugs, such as Novo Nordisk‘s Wegovy, are around $1,000 per month before insurance and other rebates. Those treatments are part of a blockbuster class of medications called GLP-1s, which mimic certain gut hormones to tamp down a person’s appetite and regulate blood sugar. 

Patients need to use a syringe and needle to draw up the medicine from a single-dose vial — the version of Zepbound Eli Lilly is releasing Tuesday — and inject themselves. That differs from single-dose autoinjector pens, the currently available form of all Zepbound doses, which patients can directly inject under their skin with the click of a button.

Eli Lilly has said the vials will create additional supply capacity because they are easier to manufacture than autoinjector pens.

The lower price points will benefit patients who are willing to pay for Zepbound themselves and are enrolled in Medicare or employer-sponsored health plans that do not currently cover obesity treatments, said Patrik Jonsson, president of Eli Lilly diabetes and obesity, in an interview. 

He noted that Medicare beneficiaries are also not eligible for Eli Lilly’s savings card programs for Zepbound. One program allows people with insurance coverage for Zepbound to pay as little as $25 out of pocket.

The company offers another to patients whose commercial insurance does not cover the drug. Patients currently enrolled in that program can continue to pay as low as $550 per month for Zepbound through the end of the year.

But as of Tuesday, the lowest cost of the drug for new patients who join that program will increase to $650 per month, according to an update on the company’s website. That price hike will “help maintain the sustainability of the program as coverage for Zepbound improves,” a spokesperson for Eli Lilly said in a statement Tuesday.

Having patients directly pay for single-dose vials of Zepbound also “enables a transparent price by removing third-party supply chain entities,” the company added in a release. 

There “will be no markups, and we believe that’s super important … that consumers have this predictability in terms of pricing,” Jonsson said. 

Patients with a valid prescription can purchase the single-dose vials from a new “self-pay pharmacy” section on the company’s direct-to-consumer site, LillyDirect. Eli Lilly is partnering with a third-party digital pharmacy, Gifthealth, which will process prescriptions electronically as well as package and send vials to eligible patients.

People can also choose to purchase syringes and needles from Eli Lilly’s website and will have access to materials on how to correctly administer Zepbound from a vial. 

LillyDirect, which launched in January, connects people with an independent telehealth company that can prescribe certain drugs if the patients are eligible. The site also offers a home-delivery option if the prescribed treatment is Eli Lilly’s, tapping a third-party online pharmacy to fill prescriptions and send them directly to patients. 

Eli Lilly said in a release that distributing the vials through the site will ensure patients and health-care providers are receiving “genuine” Zepbound. It builds on the company’s efforts to “help protect the public from the dangers posed by the proliferation of counterfeit, fake, unsafe or untested knock-offs of Lilly’s medications,” according to the release.

During shortages, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows compounding pharmacies to make versions of drugs that are essentially a copy of brand-name medicines. Compounded medications are custom-made alternatives to branded drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs. 

But both Zepbound and Eli Lilly’s diabetes drug, Mounjaro, are under patent protection in the U.S. The company also does not supply the active ingredient of those two drugs, tirzepatide, to outside groups. 

Eli Lilly has said that raises questions about what some compounding pharmacies and other clinics are selling and marketing to consumers. The company and its rival Novo Nordisk have both stepped in to address illicit versions of their weight loss and diabetes treatments, suing wellness clinics, medical spas and compounding pharmacies across the U.S. over the past year. 

All doses of Zepbound are now listed as available on the FDA’s drug shortage database. Still, thousands of online platforms offering compounded versions of weight loss drugs from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly have cropped up over the past six months, according to Jonsson. 

“We believe that the U.S. population is actually a target for … untested, unapproved, unregulated anti-obesity medications that we know is far from always containing the drug it’s supposed to,” he said. “This is also an opportunity to make sure that there is access to FDA-approved, quality-approved tirzepatide for consumers in need.”