Weight Loss Drama Compounds on Heels of Novo, Lilly Earnings, Plus Gene Therapy News

Last Thursday, Hims & Hers launched a compounded versionof Novo’s oral Wegovy, approved just before Christmas and launched in early January. Novo was, not surprisingly, none too pleased. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary denounced“illegal copycat drugs” in an X post the same day without naming Hims, which then said it would notsell the oral weight loss drug. Novo sued the consumer healthcare company for patent infringement, seeking potentially hundreds of millions in damages. Thenit emerged that FDA hit Hims with a warning letter last year about infestations of vermin at a facility it owns, including rodents, birds and insects, as well as a live spider in a production area.The timing of all the Hims drama is interesting, because BioSpace was already covering Novo, Lilly and their blockbuster GLP weight loss drugs as both companies—and others—reported 2025 fourth quarter and full year earnings. EliLilly and Novo both reported last Wednesday, and both spoke of Novo’s oral Wegovy launch positively. But the calls had two very different tones, as Lilly beat Q4 2025 analyst consensus by more than a billion dollars while Novo projected sales to decline by 5% in 2026.In other recent earnings calls, AbbVie touted strong Skyriziand Rinvoq sales, and the company continues to follow Johnson & Johnson’s lead into the psychedelics space. And Biogen discussed the highly anticipated readout of its tau-targetingtherapy for Alzheimer’s.Finally, in gene therapy, Sarepta struggles to recover from last year’s patient deaths as other DMD contenders near the market; uniQure pauses two arms of a clinical trial for Fabry disease; and Ultragenyx resubmits its in vivo gene therapy UX111 for the treatment of Sanfilippo syndrome type A.