Placement|The vice president of the pharmaceutical company described Alzheimer’s research as a lottery ticket: there could be new potential or nothing at all.
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The share of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk fell almost ten percent on Monday.
The company said that semaglutide, known as its weight loss drug, is not helpful in slowing Alzheimer’s disease.
Novo Nordisk’s study investigated the effectiveness of the drug in more than 3,800 Alzheimer’s patients.
The company has been looking for new uses for its medicine, because the competition in the diet medicine market has intensified and the patents for the medicine are starting to expire.
From his diet pill The share of the well-known Danish company Novo Nordisk has been in a sharp plunge on Monday, when the company reported research data that turned out to be disappointing.
At its worst, the stock was down 11 percent on the Copenhagen stock exchange. At the time of publication of the story at half past four in the afternoon, the stock was down 10 percent.
The share price went down sharply when the company announced the results of a study, according to which semaglutide, used for weight loss and diabetes treatment, is not helpful in slowing down Alzheimer’s disease.
Novo Nordisk sells the drug semaglutide under the trade names Ozempic and Wegovy. Ozempic can also be used to treat diabetes.
Novo Nordisk had studied the possibilities of finding new uses for a weight loss drug that has proven to be a huge success, as competition in the market for weight loss and diabetes drugs has intensified.
The company’s goal was to find out if semaglutide could slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The study included 3,800 patients.
The Rybelsus pill containing semaglutide, which is used to treat diabetes, was used in the study.
However, in cognitive evaluations, it was not found that the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, i.e. the deterioration of cognitive abilities, of the patients who used the drug had slowed down.
According to the Reuters news agency, the company’s vice president Ludovic Helfgott described Alzheimer’s research earlier in the fall as a lottery ticket, meaning that there could be either great potential or nothing at all.
With Novo Nordisk is in a hurry to find new markets for its drugs, because semaglutide patents begin to expire partly already next year.
Intensified competition has caused the company to cut costs with layoffs. Earlier in the fall, the company said it was aiming for one billion euros in savings and to cut 11 percent of its workforce. That means 9,000 jobs. In total, Novo Nordisk has 78,000 employees in 80 countries.
The value of Novo Nordisk’s share, which previously skyrocketed wildly, has already fallen by almost 60 percent this year.