Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, is now Europe's largest company as global demand for its drugs have soared. But the Danish pharmaceutical company's origins were motivated by more personal reasons, not financial. The company was launched in the early 1920s by Nobel laureate August Krogh and his wife Marie, a doctor living with diabetes. At the time, diabetes was a death sentence. The couple met at the Danish Medical School, where August was Marie's professor.
'The agreement was that if there were revenues and proceeds from the sales of insulin here in Scandinavia, it should be returned to society in the form of support for research into physiology and medicine,' said Mads Krogsgaard, the Novo Nordisk Foundation's CEO. In 2023, the foundation awarded more than $1 billion to projects in education, health and development projects around the world.