Business
Novo Nordisk sues Hims & Hers over compounded obesity drugs
Novo Nordisk on Monday said it is suing online telehealth provider Hims & Hers for mass marketing cheaper, unapproved copies of the drugmaker’s new Wegovy obesity pill and injections in the U.S.
Novo is asking the court to permanently ban Hims from selling compounded versions of its drugs that infringe on the company’s patents and is seeking to recover damages.
“This is a complete sham, and it has been a sham since the shortage ended,” said John Kuckelman, Novo’s group general counsel of global legal, intellectual property and security, in an interview.
“The fact is that their medicines are untested, and they’re putting patients at risk,” he added, referring to how the safety, efficacy and quality of compounded medicines are not verified by U.S. regulators.
The move escalates the feud between Novo and Hims, which said on Saturday it will stop offering its new copycat obesity pill after facing scrutiny from federal regulators and legal threats from the Danish drugmaker. Hims had planned to offer the oral drug for as little as $49 for the first month, roughly $100 less than Novo’s approved Wegovy pill.
In a statement on Monday, Hims said the lawsuit is “a blatant attack by a Danish company on millions of Americans who rely on compounded medications for access to personalized care” and is another case of Big Pharma “weaponizing the US judicial system to limit consumer choice.”
Hims added it has a “long history of providing safe access to personalized healthcare” to patients.
Novo Nordisk’s Copenhagen-listed shares climbed more than 3% on Monday, while Hims’ NYSE-listed stock fell more than 27%.
The lawsuit comes as Novo works to reclaim market share in the booming obesity drug market and fend off competition from both Eli Lilly and a wave of compounded alternatives. Those copycats have proliferated under a regulatory loophole that allows companies like Hims to sell compounded versions of patent-protected drugs when branded treatments are in short supply.
Semaglutide — the active ingredient in Novo’s pill and its blockbuster injections — is no longer in shortage in the U.S., thanks to the company’s efforts to ramp up manufacturing capacity. There are no shortages reported for the Wegovy pill, which has had an explosive launch since it entered the U.S. market in early January.
Even so, Novo estimated in January that as many as 1.5 million Americans are using compounded GLP-1 drugs.
Hims has said its compounded pill and other GLP-1 products contain semaglutide, despite the ingredient being protected by U.S. patents through 2032. Hims has said its versions are legal because they are “personalized” in dosage.
But Novo said it does not directly or indirectly sell semaglutide for copycats, and accused Hims of engaging in illegal mass compounding.
“I would just say we do want an end to mass compounding, to unlawful mass compounding,” Kuckelman said, noting that Novo is not trying to stop all compounding practices.
He said compounding has to be based on legitimate grounds, “as opposed to you producing mass stocks of what you’re calling a personalized medicine, which is really just a dosage variation.”
Compounded drugs can be produced on a case-by-case basis when a doctor determines it is medically necessary for a patient, such as when they can’t swallow a pill or are allergic to a specific ingredient in a branded drug.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration announced it planned to take legal action against Hims for the pill, including restricting access to the ingredients and referring the company to the Department of Justice over potential violations.
Kuckelman said some telehealth platforms, such as Ro, “are doing the right things” by transitioning to providing patients with real FDA-approved products from Novo and its competitors.
But “some won’t, and the only way it appears that we’re going to get Hims and others to stop this is through hopefully government enforcement actions and through lawsuits like the one that we’ve filed today,” he said.
Novo and Lilly have aggressively cracked down on compounding pharmacies over the past two years as they benefit from the soaring popularity of their weight loss and diabetes drugs. Novo has so far filed around 130 lawsuits dealing with deceptive marketing practices and consumer fraud, Kuckelman said.
Lilly has gone through a similar legal process with tirzepatide, the active ingredient in its weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro, which is no longer in short supply in the U.S.
L. Erika Penala
UBS Investment Bank, Research Division
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. So rounding off the corporate presentation today, we have KeyCorp. And we had Ken Gavrity. He is the Head of the Commercial Bank. And before he sits down with me for a fireside chat, he wanted to share a few slides. Ken, thank you for coming.
Ken Gavrity
Head of Commercial Banking
Perfect. Well, thanks for having me, Erika, pleased to be here, of course. So as Erika said, I lead Key’s Commercial Banking business, which includes our Middle Market business segment as well as our Commercial Payments platform, and as a reminder, we define the middle market segment as companies with annual revenue size from $10 million in revenue, up to as high as $1 billion in revenue. And our commercial payments organization serves a broader range of customers that goes all the way down from small business through middle market, up to our corporate and institutional clients as well.
So before I jump into the slides, I’ve been asked to read the following in the back of today’s presentation, which you can find in the Investor Relations section of key.com website. You’ll find our statements on forward-looking disclosures. These statements cover our presentation and related comments as well as the question-and-answer segment of today’s webcast.
Forward-looking statements speak only as of today, February 9, 2026. So with that, okay, I’m going to start on Slide 2, overview of the Commercial Bank. So from a size and scale perspective, you can see on the right-hand side of the page, it’s a significant portion of Key’s overall revenue and core
Buy Or Sell Kevin Warsh?
Other writing on Substack: https://yieldstrategies.substack.com/I am currently focused on income investing through either common shares, preferred shares, or bonds. I will occasionally break away and write about the economy at large or a special situation involving a company I’ve been researching in. I target two articles per week for publication on Monday and Tuesday.About My Background: Bachelors in history/political science, Masters in Business Administration with a specialization in Finance and Economics. I enjoy numbers. I have been investing since 2000. Professionally, I am the CEO of an independent living retirement community in Illinois.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of WAFDP either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the launch of GenAI.mil, a military-focused AI platform is designed to give personnel direct access to AI tools to help “revolutioniz[e] the way we win.” (Department of War)
EXCLUSIVE – The War Department will partner with OpenAI to integrate the chatbot into GenAI.mil, a tool for military service members.
The move will make OpenAI’s advanced language models “readily available to all 3 million War Department personnel,” the agency said.
“ChatGPT will be made available to enhance mission execution and readiness, delivering reliable capabilities to the joint force,” a War Department news release states.
The agency has committed to becoming an AI-first enterprise, reflected by GenAI.mil, it said.
GOOGLE CEO CALLS FOR NATIONAL AI REGULATION TO COMPETE WITH CHINA MORE EFFECTIVELY
GenAI.mil’s rapid growth continues with OpenAI ChatGPT integration. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“The platform’s proven reliability, evidenced by its 100% uptime since launch and its robust infrastructure, has established it as the trusted AI platform across the Department,” the agency said.
Its adoption is already “accelerating operational tempo and sharpening the decision superiority of its users,” it said.
War Department personnel are being trained to integrate AI capabilities into their daily workflow, officials said.
In December, the Pentagon announced the launch of GenAI.mil, which is powered by Google Gemini and has surpassed one million unique users in the two months since its deployment.
“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI,” War Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video obtained by FOX Business at the time. “As technologies advance, so do our adversaries. But here at the War Department, we are not sitting idly by.”
The platform puts “the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, starting with Google Gemini, directly into the hands of every American warrior,” he added.
The Pentagon launched a platform powered by Google Gemini called GenAI.mil, giving 3 million military personnel access to advanced AI tools. (Getty Images)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that the company has partnered with government agencies for decades, but emphasized the significance of the new project.
“Through this deployment of Google Cloud’s ‘Gemini for Government’ offering, more than 3 million civilian and military personnel will be able to access the same advanced AI that businesses use every day to drive administrative efficiency and greater business productivity,” said Pichai.
In January, the War Department announced the launch of its Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy, an initiative intended to eliminate legacy bureaucratic blockers, and integrate the leading edge of frontier AI capabilities across every mission area.
The wartime approach is based on the emphasis of three tenets: warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations.
“Speed defines victory in the AI era, and the War Department will match the velocity of America’s AI industry,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said previously. “We’re pulling in the best talent, the most cutting‑edge technology, and embedding the top frontier AI models into the workforce — all at a rapid wartime pace.”
The Pentagon is launching GenAI.mil – a military-focused AI platform powered by Google Gemini. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
GOOGLE CEO CALLS FOR NATIONAL AI REGULATION TO COMPETE WITH CHINA MORE EFFECTIVELY
The Trump administration has made AI a priority as adversaries such as China continue to develop and experiment with the technology. In December, President Donald Trump announced that he would be reversing a Biden-era restriction on high-end chip exports, permitting Nvidia to export its artificial-intelligence chips to China and other countries.
The H200 chips are high-performance processors made by Nvidia that help run artificial intelligence programs, like chatbots, machine learning and data-center tasks.
FOX Business’ Andrea Margolis and Lorraine Taylor contributed to this report.
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