Novo Nordisk’s CEO was magnanimous about Pfizer’s victory in last year’s bidding war over an obesity biotech, but the Danish pharma is making no secret of the fact it remains on the lookout for a similar prize.
A bold attempt by Novo to snatch Metsera out of Pfizer’s grasp in the fall saw the price tag for the U.S. obesity biotech rise from around $7.3 billion to closer to $10 billion. Pfizer’s eventual success received some validation yesterday when Metsera’s lead asset, a monthly-dosed GLP-1 receptor agonist, was tied to placebo-adjusted weight loss of 10% and 12.3% at the low and medium doses, respectively.
Reflecting on how close Novo came to securing Metsera, CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar told Fierce this morning that the company “had the financial discipline to basically stop when the price went higher.”
“Our colleagues in Pfizer were able to take those assets for a bit more and we wish them luck,” Doustdar said on a fourth-quarter earnings call with journalists.
“I have said a number of times that those assets were worth the price that they had mentioned to us and not a penny more—and I still stand by that,” the CEO added in response to a question from Fierce.
However, Novo’s ambition to “sustain and grow our leadership in diabetes and obesity” means Doustdar will continue to scan the sector for similar candidates from other companies.
“We need … multiples of different assets to deal with the diversity of the patient population that these two therapy areas entail,” the CEO said. “Many of those solutions we have in-house … but we will also continue looking outside and see what has been made by others that complements what we have in our pipeline.”
“When we find something, we will value it, we put a price on it, we go after it, and we'll try to purchase that and bring it into the company,” Doustdar said. “That ... was the case with Metsera, and that will be the case going forward.”
Beyond an oral version of its blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy, which launched last month, Novo touted potential next-gen obesity treatments like zenagamtide—the new name for the dual GLP-1 and amylin agonist amycretin, which is set to enter phase 3 trials this year.
There’s also CagriSema, a combination of Wegovy’s ingredient semaglutide with the amylin receptor agonist cagrilintide, which bested Wegovy when it came to weight loss in a phase 3 trial of diabetes patients this week.
Still, CagriSema is administered as a weekly shot, while the injectable and oral versions of zenagamtide are administered weekly and daily, respectively. It means there remains a gap in Novo’s pipeline for the sort of effective monthly dosing that was offered by Metsera’s candidate.
On the same call, Novo’s chief financial officer Karsten Munk Knudsen was explicit that the company would continue to look out for similar assets.
“There will be a segment of the market where patients will prefer long-acting GLP-1s, and that's clearly also something that we're looking into,” he said.
Last year was a tough period for the company, with underwhelming performance in the U.S. leading to a C-suite shakeup that saw Doustdar take the top seat and implement 9,000 layoffs as well as trim back the pharma’s R&D pipeline.
In his wrap-up speech this morning, the CEO said he “acknowledge[d] 2025 presented significant challenges affecting our performance and share price” but insisted that those adversities “have also made us more resilient.”
Those same adversities are not over yet, though, with Novo’s stock sinking 14% yesterday after the pharma put out word that it expects sales and earnings to slide between 5% and 13% this year.
When asked by a journalist on this morning’s call whether the company is in crisis, Doustdar’s answer was blunt: “No.”