Novo Nordisk's Two Fronts: CagriSema's 25% Weight Loss and a Courtroom Rebuff That Settles Nothing
Published on 10/27/2026 at 15:20 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Novo Nordisk has handed investors two very different pieces of news within days of each other, and neither one answers the question the market actually cares about. On one side sits a fresh round of clinical data for CagriSema. On the other, a US judge has refused to block Eli Lilly's advertising — a procedural defeat that says far less than the headlines suggest.
What the CagriSema numbers actually show
The Danish drugmaker released two post-hoc analyses of its Phase 3 REDEFINE 1 trial on 20 October. Among 2,309 women, average weight loss on CagriSema reached 25.0%, against 3.0% on placebo, measured after 68 weeks.
Two caveats travel with those figures. The results rest on a treatment-adherence assumption, and they stem from retrospective analyses of an existing study rather than a new standalone trial. A second analysis broke the data down by menopausal status: women before menopause averaged 26.7% weight loss, those during menopause 24.8%, and those past it 23.1%. The subgroup split offers a sharper view of the populations studied, though it does not explain the differences — and it does nothing to lift the adherence caveat hanging over the headline number.
The ad dispute is about dosing, not just claims
Novo's legal action targets Lilly's comparative campaigns — Zepbound against Wegovy, Mounjaro against Ozempic. The core objection is one of comparison basis: Novo argues Lilly pits higher doses of its own drugs against lower doses of Novo's. One advertisement cites an average loss of 50 pounds on Zepbound versus 33 pounds on Wegovy, a comparison that, according to media reports, draws on a study published in 2025.
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Novo counters with trial data showing roughly 47 pounds of average loss on high-dose Wegovy and 48 pounds on Zepbound. Those figures form part of Novo's argument in the litigation; no court has yet confirmed that Lilly's advertising is misleading on that basis.
Why the injunction failed — and what it didn't decide
US District Judge Zahid Quraishi found insufficient evidence of irreparable harm to sales, business value or clinical reputation, Reuters reported. The campaigns, he reasoned, had influenced the market by at most a negligible amount between April and July, and Novo's prescriptions held steady throughout.
That reasoning cuts both ways. It establishes no sales slump caused by the ads, and equally it validates none of Lilly's superiority claims. Lilly can keep running the contested spots while the case proceeds. The underlying lawsuit survives, and Novo is seeking lost profits plus their tripling under US law. What the court declined to do was grant preliminary relief — it made no ruling on whether the advertisements were lawful.
The revenue at stake
The scale explains the intensity. Novo booked around USD 32 billion in 2025 revenue from obesity medicines and Ozempic combined, per Reuters. Bloomberg Intelligence projects the global obesity treatment market could reach USD 120 billion annually by 2030 — a forecast, not a current figure.
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A business of that size makes the advertising fight worth waging. It does not, however, substitute for proving that a specific campaign caused measurable damage, and that evidentiary gap is precisely where the injunction request fell short.
The date that matters next
Novo Nordisk will publish results for the first nine months of 2026 on 4 November. That announcement, not the courtroom skirmish or the subgroup tables, will show how the business is actually performing. Until then, the CagriSema readouts add efficacy detail on one side of the ledger, while the rejected injunction leaves the misleading-advertising question unresolved on the other. Neither development settles anything close to a final verdict on Novo's products or its prospects.
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