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00:00So we spoke in December after you were granted U.S. approval to launch your obesity pill
00:04this month in January, the first drug maker to do so. I know it's early, but what has uptake
00:09looked like so far? It's been really exciting to launch, and I think when you go around this
00:13Congress and hear the excitement externally, we are of course objective, but externally everyone
00:19being excited about it gives you a good feeling. The uptake has been good, but it's really early
00:24days for me to go into the details of it, but it really speaks to the fact that we also spoke
00:30earlier. There's been a lot of people that are excited about GOP-1 category, weight loss, but
00:37did not want to take an injection. There's the taboo of injection, there's needle phobia,
00:42and they've been waiting. So we are super excited that we're finally having an offering for this
00:49large group of people that have been wanting a pill. And critically, you have a couple
00:54months here when it comes to Eli Lilly. They're slated to get approval sometime in the next
00:58couple months. How do you prevent your patients from switching to Lilly's pill, which I understand
01:03doesn't have exactly the same food restrictions as yours does, once that is on the market?
01:09A couple of points. When we started actually deciding how to go into the oral segment and decided
01:15that we should put our protein and peptide and encapsulate it and take that route, most people
01:20thought that this is going to be impossible. Scientifically, you don't find examples of a
01:25protein, large protein peptides going inside orally and not being dissolved by the enzymes of your
01:32stomach. We were able to do that magically, I would say, but now, of course, we're getting the fruits of
01:38that. We have, for the first time, the efficacy of our pill at 16.6% when you take the drug,
01:46being exactly equal to the pen version of it, the VGOV pen, again, at 16.6%. That, of course,
01:55is second to none. When you take a look at the data from all of our competition in late pipeline or
02:01early pipeline, no one has that efficacy. That, I think, is a big leap that we will talk to,
02:06not least, of course, VGOV pill also have the CV benefits that our competition does not have at
02:12this point. So I'm incredibly grateful for that. Now, you talked about restrictions. I think there's
02:19a lot of drugs that have restrictions, including our own diabetes version of this called Rebelsis,
02:24where we have one and a half million patients on the product and not complaining whatsoever
02:29about that restrictions. We have this simple saying of sip and go. So I'm very thankful that we basically
02:36have been able to prove that on the market with Rebelsis, and I'm very optimistic that VGOV pill will show the
02:42same. Let's talk a little bit about production of the pill, because you think about the amount that you
02:48need of the drug ingredient for the pill versus the shots. How profitable is it to make and produce
02:54the pills versus the shots? Well, if we could not make any financial gains or profits out of it, then
02:59we probably would not have launched it. So we have made a couple of things very clear. Again, it comes back
03:05to the skepticism that going the peptide route orally is the wrong one, because no one else has done it,
03:14that people first and foremost started telling us it's not scientifically possible when we proved that
03:19right. Then they started focusing, well, can you produce enough of it? And is it profitable? And we
03:24basically tell people that we have produced more than enough of it. That's why we're launching it.
03:29And that we are actually going to make a decent business out of this. So I'm very optimistic about
03:34this pill as we go forward. And again, the single biggest difference, and people have not understood
03:40that this is not a chemical entity, a small molecule, as almost all pills are. Because of that, you have an
03:48incredibly potent, effective pill at hand, which we have uniquely learned how to scale it, and of course,
03:57make a decent business out of it. So let's talk a little bit about pricing as well, because you
04:02were one of several drug companies that signed pricing deals with the White House at the end
04:07of last year. So you think about Medicare, you think about Medicaid, how much of your obesity business
04:13do you think could actually come from those two avenues? What we have seen recently, of course,
04:19the lion's share of the business still is through the insured channels. And I think for a long time,
04:23it probably remains that. But you have also seen that unfortunately, through the insurance channels,
04:29even though the sheer number of people that have insurances are large, so 55 million people are
04:35insured with our Vigovi product. Because of all the restrictions that are put upon them,
04:41the pre-authorizations and basically a lot of questionnaires that they need to fill, many of these
04:47patients prefer to go through the cash channels and pay a reasonable amount of money, albeit a bit
04:55larger than their co-pay, but source the product from the cash channel. So we have seen both for us
05:00as well as our competition that the growth recently has been through the cash channels. We will work
05:05very well with both of these channels. We will continue, of course, working incredibly tight with
05:11our partners in the insured section, but continue to develop the cash channels as we do think that
05:19this is the future in many ways. That's really interesting when you talk about, you know, the growth
05:22coming from the cash channel. Are you able to quantify that, you know, the type of numbers that you are
05:27seeing? Well, last year, we had basically had 10% of our sales coming through the cash channels. And that we
05:35publicly said is not good enough. For our competition, I believe the number was around 30% or so.
05:39So we have set ourselves the goal to increase the number and go forward. But we also recognize
05:46that many patients don't necessarily want to come to your own website. We have a website called
05:51noblecarepharmacy.com, which is good. And now we have revamped it, and I'm very proud of it.
05:57But the truth is that some people actually like to source the product from Roe, from LifeMD,
06:02from Weight Watchers, from Amazon Pharmacy. And we should be able to basically allow them rather
06:08than try to force them to only come through our own channel. So what you have seen from our company
06:13over the last five, six months is major number of partnerships with all of these players so that
06:21patients don't need to move away from wherever they are. We'll join them and meet them where they are.
06:27Yeah, that's fascinating, especially when it comes to the telehealth platforms. It feels like that's
06:31becoming ubiquitous in American life. I do want to talk a little bit about, you know, potential catalysts
06:36from here. Obviously, the pill in that approval was a big one. But you think about the readout
06:41that you're seeing when it comes to redefine four. That is CAGRASEMA versus SEP bound. My understanding
06:47that's due in the first quarter. What's your confidence level as you're heading into that print?
06:52We have two trials I'm looking forward to. There's redefine four and redefine 11. I would say on
06:58redefine four, we are trying to get non-inferiority. So that's really important to speak to. On redefine
07:0611, we have rechanged our methodology and redesigned the trial a bit differently. It's here with American
07:13patients only. And we are asking the patients to titrate, albeit at their own pace. So I'm a little
07:22bit looking more forward to redefine 11, I would say. But on both of those, we will once again prove
07:28that CAGRASEMA is the next generation of the product. And it's going to have not only a very decent
07:36efficacy, much more than what we see in the market currently today, but also with a very reasonable
07:43tolerability, which I think comes from the amylin molecule that really has proven to be a fantastic
07:50molecule in weight management when it especially comes to tolerability.
07:53So redefine four, but especially redefine 11, we'll be keeping an eye out for that. I do have to ask
07:59you a little bit when it comes to the politics of it all. We know that President Donald Trump
08:03is in a feud, if you want to call it, with Denmark over Greenland. Of course, you are based in Denmark.
08:10How do you make sure that what's going on at the government level doesn't impact your own dealings
08:15with the Trump administration?
08:16So I learned a long time ago that one of the benefits of working in the pharmaceutical industry
08:22is you could basically tell both sides of the politics that I'm here for the patients.
08:31My job is to put the patients at the center of everything that I do. And patients are my politics.
08:38And interesting enough, it doesn't matter if you're the right side or the left side of the political
08:43spectrum, you understand that because both sides often agree that improving health, especially
08:51at scales like we do, is the most important thing. So I will leave the politics to the politicians.
08:57And my job is to really focus around expanding access to health care, which my company is synonymous
09:04for.
09:04Patients are your politics. I like that. I do want to talk a little bit about AI. We are sitting
09:09here, having this conversation in San Francisco. And AI and its potential when it comes to the
09:15health industry has definitely emerged as a theme. You think about Eli Lilly, the partnerships
09:19that they've signed with NVIDIA, the news from this conference that NVIDIA will invest a billion
09:24dollars in developing a lab with Eli Lilly. How are you thinking about AI when it comes to
09:30your business? And could you anticipate Novo signing some sort of similar partnership with
09:35one of these AI companies?
09:36I would say that when you think about technology as a whole and pharmaceuticals, the pharma industry
09:41has been a bit conservative, adapting technology much less than some of the other, of course,
09:49industries that you see. Predominantly maybe because us as humans, we have shied away about
09:54sharing our health-related data as much as we talk about where we ate and where we walked
10:01on Instagram or Facebook. Coming to discussing our health issues has been a little bit more
10:07reserved. That is changing. I think an AI is really becoming an interesting topic and I have no doubt
10:15AI will answer many of the questions we have not been able to answer. If you think about our industry,
10:22it's a lot about trials and errors and really trying to figure out will this work or not. With the help
10:29of AI, I think those answers will be addressed much differently than we have been able to do
10:36without them. So I think from discovery to research, AI is going to play a major role in understanding
10:45science and bringing molecules and drugs faster to markets. But also when you get into the regulatory
10:50front and being able to file for approvals, I think you can also shorten the time. So my hope is in years
10:58to come, you will see from the onset of an idea from a scientist to a placement of a product in a
11:06pharmacy, you will see a shorter time horizon than today's 10 to 15 years, which ultimately will
11:12benefit the patients.
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