Injection pens on the Wegovy line at the Novo Nordisk A/S production facilities in Hillerod, Denmark. MUST CREDIT: Carsten Snejbjerg/Bloombergby Ike Swetlitz and Madison Muller, Bloomberg NewsThe first dose of a copycat weight-loss drug Lindsay Posey took from a new pharmacy worked well. The second didn’t quite suppress her appetite. It was the third dose that she thinks caused her trouble.
It’s rare for lucrative drugs to so quickly go into short supply and stay that way for this long, said Carson Riley, a vice president at Bourne Partners who specializes in compounding. He called the recent explosion of copycat weight-loss drugs “unprecedented.” “I can’t say with any consistency that everybody’s doing it safely,” said Eric Kastango, a pharmacist who was an expert witness in a high-profile compounding lawsuit. Even with his background, he said there’s no “easy way to differentiate a good pharmacy from a pharmacy that I would stay away from.”
When Hims & Hers Health Inc. said in May it was going to start offering compounded weight-loss drugs, its market value rose by nearly $900 million in a single day. Family offices, private equity firms, and even “ordinary people” are trying to buy compounding pharmacies in hopes of making what could be millions of dollars a month, said Anthony Mahajan, a former federal prosecutor and founding partner of the law firm Health Law Alliance that represents compounding pharmacies.
“The quality chasm between manufacturing and compounding done at a pharmacist level is still quite wide and quite varied,” said Kastango.