Novo Nordisk's Courtroom Loss and CagriSema Data Both Defer to the 4 November Earnings Test
Published on 10/27/2026 at 19:11 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Novo Nordisk investors got two very different pieces of news this month, and neither one settles the question that matters most: how the underlying business is actually performing. A US court declined to block Eli Lilly's comparative advertising, while fresh CagriSema analyses landed on 20 October. Both are worth reading closely — but for reasons that have little to do with each other.
A judge finds no evidence of harm — and says nothing about the ads themselves
US District Judge Zahid Quraishi rejected Novo's request for a preliminary injunction, according to Reuters, finding insufficient evidence of imminent revenue loss, reputational damage or lasting harm. For the period under review, the court judged the market impact of the contested ads to be negligible at most.
That is an economic finding, not a legal verdict on the advertising. The judge did not rule on whether the claims are misleading, and Novo's lawsuit — filed in July — remains live. Lilly is free to keep running the campaigns in the meantime.
The dispute centres on how Lilly frames its obesity and diabetes drugs against Novo's. Zepbound is pitched against Wegovy for weight loss, and Mounjaro against Ozempic for type 2 diabetes. Novo's objection: higher doses of the Lilly products are being set against lower doses of its own medicines, and older study data is being used.
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One ad cites an average weight loss of 50 pounds on Zepbound versus 33 pounds on Wegovy, drawn from a head-to-head trial published in 2025. Those figures describe one specific trial comparison — not every approved dose. Novo counters with results from separate studies, which are not a new direct comparison of the two drugs within a single investigation. It points to an average of 47 pounds lost on high-dose Wegovy against 48 pounds on Zepbound. The FDA approved the higher Wegovy dose in March, and Novo began marketing it in April. After Novo's cease-and-desist letter, Lilly added references to high-dose Wegovy and the absence of a comparison against it to newer Zepbound ads.
CagriSema's 25% figure comes with a condition attached
The clinical update published on 20 October offers a different kind of information. Two post-hoc analyses of the phase 3 REDEFINE 1 trial looked at 2,309 women. Average weight loss on CagriSema came in at 25.0%, against 3.0% on placebo, measured after 68 weeks.
The number carries a caveat that belongs front and centre: it reflects the analysis assuming treatment adherence. It also stems from retrospective analyses of an existing trial, not from a new standalone study.
A second cut of the data broke the results down by menopausal status. Women before menopause averaged 26.7% weight loss; during menopause, 24.8%; after menopause, 23.1%. The breakdown gives a sharper view of the populations studied, but it does not lift the adherence assumption, and the subgroup figures on their own offer no explanation for the differences between them.
Why the two stories shouldn't be blended
It would be easy to read the courtroom setback and the CagriSema data as a single verdict on Novo — one pushing sentiment down, the other pulling it up. That would be a mistake. The injunction ruling addresses only the requested advertising freeze. The CagriSema analyses address only weight-loss efficacy in women under a stated assumption. Neither tells you whether the ads were misleading, and neither substitutes for a look at the commercial trajectory.
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The stakes in the advertising fight are not small. Novo booked roughly USD 32 billion in 2025 revenue from obesity medicines and Ozempic combined, so how rivals are allowed to frame comparative efficacy is a live commercial question. Yet the failed injunction motion changes nothing about that revenue base today.
The date that actually matters
Novo plans to publish results for the first nine months of 2026 on 4 November. That is the appointment that speaks to the operating business, while the clinical readouts and the advertising litigation each answer separate questions. Until then, the picture stays split down the middle: CagriSema adds efficacy data, the ad dispute remains unresolved on the merits, and the earnings release is the next real test.
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