Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman from Sides Vs. Today we've got something a little different for you.
We are sharing an episode from The Journal about the rise of Ozempic and other blockbuster drugs that are being used for weight loss.
And this episode is part of a series that The Journal is doing, called Trillion Dollar Shot.
Now, if you listen to Sides Vs a lot — thank you — but you'll know that we've covered these kinds of drugs a bit and we've talked about how they work and what their potential side effects are.
But in this episode today, you're going to hear the details of how these medications first got made and how, for a moment there, it looked like Big Pharma was going to stop their development.
Trillion dollar short is coming up just after the break.
This episode is brought to you by Indeed.
Taking things slow isn't always a good thing.
Sometimes, you need to speed things along.
There was one time that our toilet was leaking.
I need a diploma fast. If you're hiring, you probably also want to get it done fast. So use Indeed.
Indeed's sponsored jobs move your job posts to the top of the page, helping you stand out and reach candidates quickly.
Speed up your hiring right now with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed .com slash science on.
That's indeed .com slash science on.
Terms and conditions apply hiring?
Indeed is all you need.
This episode is brought to you by Brooks.
So Brooks just released the new glycerin 22 running shoes, and let me tell you why I think you're gonna love them.
So I have weird -shaped feet.
I know lots of people don't love their feet, but seriously.
I have bunions on one side of my foot.
On the other side, there's this bone that may as well be a bunion.
The pinky toe is weird. The second toe, it's all just a mess.
And it means that buying shoes is a real mess.
Every single time I buy shoes, and particularly running shoes, I have to coat my feet with band -aids so I don't get blisters.
Except for when I wear brooks.
Seriously, I just put on my new glycerin 22 running shoes just then and went for a run.
No band -aids. And my feet feel great.
It was a great run.
They were bouncy, it was fun.
They're also so bright.
They're so clean. I guess that's just because they're new shoes.
But seriously, I'm really excited about these shoes.
If you want to know more about the Glycerin 22 shoe, head to brooksrunning .com.
I admit to a slight bit of syringe anxiety.
I'm not happy to admit that, but you know, that is something that I've dealt with.
Back in January, I hopped on a video call with my colleague Bradley Olsen, who's out in San Francisco.
Brad was about to give himself a dose of a drug he'd been taking for weight loss.
It was an unusual and personal moment for a co -worker to share.
Whenever I would get it, like the first couple of times, I would like, just breathe in, breathe out, you know?
And then it would feel like ridiculous because it's like a very small pin prick that you barely feel, you know?
Brad has struggled with his weight for more than 20 years, and he said this medication made it easier than it had ever been for him to lose weight.
In five months, Brad had lost about 40 pounds.
You know, the thing that was in the beginning like a revelation, I know that sounds crazy, but like without medicine, when I would eat well, when I would kind of follow a good course, I would just feel very hungry, and it wouldn't be a good hungry, it would just be annoying.
an annoying, disruptive, and frustrating.
When you're on the medicine, it was just great.
Those those voices, which I came to really hate, were just silent.
This medicine is part of a new class of pharmaceuticals that has exploded in popularity over the last few years.
The most well -known is Ozempic.
Brad was taking one called Mount Jaro.
Anyway, so I'm gonna take my syringe out of the box.
It's five milligrams. And, you know, it's refrigerated, so it feels vaguely cold.
You can put the injection in your upper thigh or in your like belly or stomach. I have never done the belly just because I don't want a syringe in my belly.
And so the thigh was always kind of where I put it.
that day that dose was Brad's last shot he had decided to stop taking the medication so without further ado here we go here's the last hurrah of Brad's That's time with Mount Jarrow.
All right, there we go.
How do you feel, Brad?
It's done, I think I feel good.
I feel a little bit of anxiety, because when you're on the medicine, it's so easy to lose weight that you don't really have to use any willpower or plan or anything.
it just is gonna happen and you know it's gonna happen.
Brad documented his journey on and off the medication.
Because his time on the medicine and his decision to stop taking it, stirred up a lot of feelings, surprise, anger, uncertainty, it was a lot.
So after Brad took his last shot, he and I decided to report on the impact of these drugs.
We set out to understand, are they a true turning point for America's struggle with obesity?
And if so, are we ready for everything that would mean?
Because people who've taken these medications told us the same things over and over again.
All of a sudden, just the weight starts falling off, you know, eight pounds the first month.
I felt like it was a miracle.
Three pounds the second month.
Life changing for sure.
10 pounds the third month.
That's how powerful this medication is.
Then it just was like, how is this happening?
I could tell it was working and I could tell that it was changing my relationship with food and I liked that.
This type of success has meant huge windfalls for drug makers.
We said, oh, Jesus, this can become a big, big drug.
It's been a boon. There's no denying that.
You know, the demand is higher than what we can deliver to people today.
And that demand for these drugs is reverberating across society.
I thought, well, I'll stay on this for life because it's so helpful and then I realized what it was going to cost me.
They're just bank breakers.
OK. If I can't get the drug, what can I take instead?
What's close? There are so many people even selling bathtub ozentepic.
There's a lot of excitement.
There's a lot of skepticism.
And I can imagine a future where life expectancies are actually increasing because of this class of drugs.
Whether you think these drugs are a miracle or you're skeptical of what they promise, they're changing how we approach one of the most intractable issues in our society, obesity, and it's just the beginning.
From the journal, this is Trillion Dollar Shot.
I'm Jessica Mendoza.
And I'm Bradley Olson.
This is Episode 1, a birth of a blockbuster.
So, why did you want to lose weight?
I'm trying to be as honest as I can as I think about it.
It's a hard question.
Yeah. And I wanted to look better, you know.
I know that some people will say it was for my kids, and it was...
I wish that I had some noble reason.
I'm just being honest, you know?
The noble reason is, like, I've got kids and I want to run with them.
And I would think about that, but I would run with them.
and I would think about other things, but in the end, I felt like I'm not supposed to be like this.
You know, this isn't me.
Brad's story is familiar to millions of Americans.
For decades, obesity has been on the rise.
The CDC says one in three adults in the US is obese.
The condition is linked to shorter life expectancy, to diabetes, heart disease, and to some cancers, not to mention larger health care bills.
And billions have been poured into addressing the issue.
But nothing's been able to bring the numbers down.
What most doctors recommend—diet and exercise—they don't work long -term for most people.
And short of surgery, the great minds of industry, technology, and medicine just haven't been able to find an effective treatment until this new class of drugs.
Every doctor interaction that you have when it's about weight loss is always the doctor's like, I'm telling you things that you're not going to do.
They don't say that, but it's just the subtext is basically like this conversation of, I'm telling you things to do and I don't think you're going to do them.
It was like we were performing in a play.
He was pretending to be a doctor that believed he was giving good advice and I was pretending to be a patient that was listening and was really going to make a change, you know?
Neither was true. And the difference with this conversation was like, this is going to work.
Like there was no doubt about whether or not it was going to work.
And that was such a difference.
And how did it go? Like, how quickly did you start to lose weight?
And what were your reactions?
I was just shocked and I had heard people talk about being on the medicine and how it really zapped their cravings, you know, I had read that, but to experience it is another thing entirely.
Brad's going to share more of his own story throughout the series.
But first, we want to go back to where it all started.
...Ozepik was developed by a Danish pharmaceutical company called Novo Nordisk.
The story starts in the 1990s with a woman named Lada Bier Knudsen.
Lada was a young scientist at Novo Nordisk.
When she was just starting her career, she was focused on what most scientists at Novo were there to do — develop drugs for treating diabetes.
I always wanted to work for this company, and I was very set on wanting to make product -related research. I never wanted to be an academic researcher.
I just knew that I wanted to make products that could somehow be useful for human beings.
And Lada had a bit of a reputation.
I won't say that I have a temper.
Maybe some people would say that about me, But I'm very dedicated and energy.
I had ideas. I wasn't really shy and I did not give up too easily.
What was it that you were working on?
We had all kinds of ideas.
At that point in time in pharma, for diabetes, there was a big desire to do something new.
You know? And then GLP -1 was just one of those ideas that were around in the community at that time.
GLP -1. It stands for glucagon -like peptide.
It's a gut hormone, and it's the basis for this new class of drugs.
When Lotta started working on it, there was research that showed that the GLP -1 hormone lowered blood sugar levels, which is important for treating diabetes.
But no one One had figured out how to make GLP -1 work as an effective treatment.
It didn't hold up in the human body for long.
It was gone in two minutes.
That was really… The problem to be solved was to make GLP -1 long -acting.
So when you say gone in two minutes or making it long -acting, does that mean it like breaks down in the body as soon as it like appears?
Yeah, there are several ways that things can disappear from the body.
Right? One is that metabolic enzymes can degrade it, but then also things can be taken out via the kidneys.
Lotto worked with a team to try to solve this puzzle, to try to get this powerful hormone to stay in the body long enough to work.
But then, she went on maternity leave, and when she came back in 1994, Novo had gone through some restructuring.
Most of the people I've worked with, they were gone.
So I was kind of like the only one that knew anything about those projects.
And the new leadership said to me, you're the one that kind of knows this biology, so you figure out what we should do.
What did you do? Did you freak out?
Not so that anyone could see it, right?
It was a little bit of a lonely time, right, because the people that I considered my closest work friends, they were gone, right?
So I still had a group of laboratory technicians that were working with me and doing cool things in the lab.
But this thing about figuring out how to lead the project, which idea to focus on, I was completely alone with that.
So I was basically sitting in my office for a couple of months, kind of staring at the walls.
Lauda was now leading the GLP -1 team, but they weren't making much headway towards a functional drug.
And leaders at Novo started to get antsy.
Leaders like this guy.
Yeah, my name is Lars Rabin -Sorenson.
I used to be the CEO of Novo Nordisk.
GLP -1 research was not the company's priority.
So Lars was like, why were they even messing around with this hormone?
Well, I have to admit at the time I thought it was a strange idea.
We were primarily selling insulin and competition in the area of of insulin were quite fierce.
This GLP -1 compound was very, very short -lived and really it was difficult to create a drug out of it.
Quite frankly, I was worried that we were spreading our resources too thinly.
We were a small company, so I knew everybody and they would come into my office and ask for more resources.
I asked Lars if Lada was one of those people.
Oh yeah, all the time.
I could not meet Lada without her really getting on my case to prioritize her projects better.
Lada Knudsen is a person that's very, very difficult to say no to.
Even with Lada pushing the project, Lada is considered canning the whole thing.
I do recall that we did give him 12 months to say, you got to come up with something which is more convincing.
And my recollection is it was extraordinarily slow developing at the time.
And I'm sure Lada will say this because we had no resources.
But anyway, because of their stubbornness in their skills, and their professionalism, they eventually were able to create a molecule that was protracted, so it became a real drug that we could start to make clinical trials on.
Lada and her team had met the deadline.
By then, it was 1997.
All told, it had taken about four years for them to create a compound that mimicked the of GLP1 and didn't immediately break down in the body.
They called this compound lyraglitide, and it stayed in the body for 24 hours.
Think of it as a precursor to Ozempic.
Same scientific idea, just not as powerful.
The next step was to test lyraglitide on patients.
But inside Novo Nordisk, Lada's team still had to fight for limited resources, and that problem felt a lot as Boss.
It's a very young lad.
I had big hair, big curly hair, lots of hair.
Not anymore. And so I look like a typical young, nerdy scientist. That's Mad's Krogsgaard -Thompson, a former senior vice president at the company and a big champion of Lada's.
And he wasn't afraid to get creative to keep her project going.
The first stumbling block was that we were a little bit behind in production capacity for insulin.
So we literally had no utilization of any production facility in the company.
So I had to keep the team money to go to Beldiam to ask another functional company to produce it for us.
And so you had to do it off, basically off campus to get this stuff done?
In a competing company already.
In a competing company.
In another company.
Eventually, they did get enough medicine for human trials, but at first, it produced a really nasty side effect.
The people in the Phase 1 trial, they vomited.
Wow. So it literally felt sick, and this, of course, didn't convince management that this was very exciting at all.
Right. They were like, this, I don't know what you guys are doing over there, but it doesn't seem to be working.
No. So there was actually a feeling of, okay.
Is this the end stage for this GLP -1 project?
And then there was a concern about cancer.
We saw tumors in rats and mice up here in the thyroid gland.
and suddenly these tumors seem to be happening dose -dependently over time in rodents.
Luckily, we didn't see them in rabbits, we didn't see them in dogs, we didn't see them in monkeys, but the regulators, FDA and so on, were not happy with seeing tumors in two species.
The team did more testing.
And ultimately, they concluded that the tumors they saw in rodents were not relevant in humans.
but it would take years before the FDA was satisfied that Novo's loraglitide was safe for people and Novo Nordisk still advises against taking GLP1 drugs if you have a history of thyroid cancer.
So the FDA approved loraglitide in 2010.
Do you remember the moment you heard about it?
My wife and kids had gone to bed and then I actually I get a phone call at like 1130 In the evening, we've got it.
We've got an approval.
Wow. And you just shout out loud and I just got extremely excited, so much that my family woke up and was really annoyed with me.
They're like, why are you so excited?
It's the middle of the night.
Yeah, yeah, I had to apologize.
So I took a good Mcallan whiskey, took a good shot of that and celebrated over the phone with the colleagues.
Yes, I was in my bed, but the minute I saw the number on my phone I knew we got this.
I felt a great sense of accomplishment.
It was more than 10 years in the making.
And if we hadn't gotten that US approval maybe it would have been just not going anywhere.
That would have been a great shame for the people who need this kind of medicine.
Liraglide went on sale under the brand name, Victoza.
It was approved to treat type 2 diabetes, and it was a modest success.
More importantly though, it was a proof of concept.
Lotta's GLP -1 research had led to an effective drug.
And the next drug, a new invention building off Liraglide, was already in the pipeline.
It would be a blockbuster.
one that would turn Novo Nordisk into a company that was known for more than diabetes.
Because here's the thing, since almost the beginning of Lotta's research, she knew that GLP -1 had another effect, weight loss.
Did that surprise you, that it was weight loss, really, that made these drugs kind of soar to the top and make it kind of a household name at this point?
Yes and no, because I remember I've heard it for such a long time ever since back to the early 2000s, when I was first lucky enough to actually be able to actually hear from some patients, they had tears in their eyes.
And they said, you know, I've been hungry for twenty years, now I can manage to have a normal life.
So, how did a diabetes drug turn into a weight loss phenomenon?
That's after the break.
This episode is brought to you by Indeed.
Making sure you have the right people for the job is essential.
Like, if you've got heart problems, you'll probably want a cardiologist. If you need to make a science podcast, you're going to need the right kind of nerd for that job.
When it comes to hiring the right people for your business, Indeed is all you need.
Because they can help you find qualified talent quickly.
Indeed's sponsored jobs help you reach relevant candidates faster, with 45 % more applications on sponsored jobs than non -sponsored jobs according to Indeed data.
Plus, you're only paying for results.
With Indeed's sponsored jobs, you don't have to worry about getting sucked into monthly subscriptions or long -term contracts.
There's no need to wait any longer.
Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.
Listeners of this show will get a $75 -sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed .com slash science on.
That's indeed .com slash science on right now to support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, indeed .com slash science on terms and conditions apply.
Hiring, indeed, is all you need.
Oh, sheet. Honey, chill, it's just laundry.
Not that, I'm talking about these Arm and Hammer power sheets.
All the power of Arm and Hammer laundry detergent in a convenient, tossable sheet.
Oh, sheet! That's what I'm saying.
And Arm and Hammer power sheets deliver an effective clean at a great price.
Think of all the laundry will do.
And all the money will save. Oh, sheet.
Arm and Hammer, more power to you.
Auto -renews at 10 .99 a month until canceled.
Offer ends 3 -30 -25.
Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.
You might say all kinds of stuff when things go wrong, but these are the words you really need to remember.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
They've got options to fit your unique insurance needs, meaning you can talk to your agent to choose the coverage you need.
Have coverage options to protect the things you value most. File a claim right on the State Farm mobile app and even reach a real person when you need to talk to someone.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
OK, thank you. Welcome to what we call the factory of the future within Novo Nordisk.
At the drug company Novo Nordisk, they're very serious about how you wear your socks.
When you put your socks on, it would be something like this.
If you put them on, you'll put your foot on.
Novo Nordisk is based near Copenhagen, Denmark.
The factory there is a hive of activity.
Alright, just keep an eye out, now we're in the area with a little bit more robot traffic.
On an assembly line, a machine places vials of clear liquid into blue syringes.
You can see the pens clattering out.
What's on the line, then?
Uh, semaglutide. Semaglutide.
Or? Semaglutide. Semaglutide.
Semaglutide. Semaglutide.
We've been saying semaglutide.
Is that right? Yeah, that is so correct.
OK. Because you hear like semaglutide or… So that's incorrect.
It is. It's semaglutide.
For the record. Thank you.
However, you say it, Somaglotide is Novo's successor to Liraglotide.
It came with some side effects — nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal issues.
But somaglotide is a more effective GLP -1 compound, and you only need to take it once a week instead of once a day.
It's also the key ingredient in Ozumpik.
In 2017, the FDA approved Ozempic specifically to treat type 2 diabetes.
That year, Novo Nordisk geared up for a big U .S. campaign.
Did people inside Novo realize they had a hit or blockbuster in Ozempic around the time of the launch?
So there was a lot of excitement and preparation.
We thought this could be one of the most important products that the company had brought to market today.
That's Dave Moore. He was in charge of sales and marketing when Ozempik launched the U .S. in 2018.
With a possible hit on their hands, Dave says the company started to get the word out.
They promoted the drug's ability to lower blood sugar levels to specialists and doctors and they spent a lot of money on branding and marketing.
thing. But you probably know that already because of this catchy tune.
People with Type 2 diabetes are excited about the potential of once weekly Osempic.
Who came up with the idea for The Jingle?
We test these and there was a really, you know, strong recall, which is important in any of these campaigns.
Like, did you like the song?
Did it resonate with you?
I did know the song and I can actually tell you the first time I heard it and I'll date myself, but I was roller skating back when I was in school in 75 and it was a hit, right?
I don't know if you'll hear this.
Oh, it's magic. You know, never believe it's not so.
There you go. That's incredible.
It's terrible! My name is David Payton.
I'm the singer -songwriter with the band Pilate and I wrote the song Magic, being used by Osempic extensively.
David Payton wrote Magic 50 years ago.
He didn't think too much of the fact that it was recently picked up for a drug ad.
Not even when he saw the company Novo Nordisk on his royalty statement.
David figured Magic had been used many times before.
When it first came out in 1974 Coca Cola got in touch with me and they?
Oh. Yeah it's been used extensively for a long time and even Selena Gomez, you might know, she had a pretty big hit with it in the States, round about 2009 or thereabouts.
I've heard lots of hip -hop versions which are very strange because you know there's a lot of rapping going on.
And then the chorus is used.
Flowrider did a version of Magic.
But something about this version seemed to land differently.
About a year after Ozempik hit the market, David was at home in Scotland when he got a call from a friend.
And he phoned me up really excited and said, David, do you realize your song is on television here in the States?
And I said, it must be every 20 minutes I'm hearing your song.
And I said to him, well I knew it was being used, but I didn't realize it was that much coverage that was goin' on in the States.
Osempic was really starting to pick up steam, except the hype wasn't because it was a drug for diabetes.
People were talking about it for weight loss.
It's known as Hollywood's worst kept secret as celebrities dropped noticeable amounts of weight quickly.
I mean I cannot scroll through my social media without someone mentioning the ozmpic diet.
By the way you've been working on your body and on your health, Oh that's ozmpic.
The topic ozmpic has over 300 million views.
When I look around this room I can't help but wonder, is ozmpic right for me?
Now, companies Studies can't promote their medicines for off -label use, but it's not unusual or necessarily unethical for doctors to prescribe a drug for something it isn't FDA approved for.
I asked Dave Moore about all this.
He's the guy who led the launch of Ozempic in the US.
As you know, today, a lot of people don't necessarily associate Ozempic with diabetes.
They associate it with obesity treatment and weight loss.
How did that happen?
when did people at Novo start realizing that it was being prescribed off -label for weight loss?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question.
I'll start with the first part.
It's really important and I'd love to stress to your listeners that Ozempic is for type 2 diabetes.
And I would ask everyone to really think about the uses of these medicines based on what they're intended for.
The second part to your question, we knew that there was a need for new medicine for people living with obesity.
And we were studying higher doses of semaglutide for chronic weight management.
And that was in clinical trials while Zempic of course was being launched into the market as a type two diabetes medication.
I totally understand what you're saying.
However, it did happen that doctors prescribed Oz unpick off -label.
I mean, they were making jokes about it at the Oscars, what do you do in a moment like that?
Yeah, I think what we have to do is play our role and do our part to ensure that we try to correct anytime that happens.
We, of course, you know, are not denying that those things happen, right?
We're not being shy.
You know, we see the media.
And ultimately, clinicians make the choice, right?
Right. And our position is firm and clear.
We don't want Osempic used off -label.
and we only want it to be used as its intended.
As Dave mentioned, NOVO was doing research into their GLP -1 drugs and weight loss.
But for a long time, it wasn't the priority.
Diabetes was. Because drugs to treat obesity look like a risky proposition.
Here's Lars Rabin Sorensen, the former NOVO CEO. I was not against that.
I actually thought it was a good idea.
However, I was a little bit cautious about expressing this publicly because at the time, almost all without exception, weight -lowering drugs have failed.
Some even so badly that companies were sued.
So I knew that if we started talking too much about the obesity effect of GLP -1 we might obtain a very good diabetes drug.
There was a quote that's been circulating the internet a little bit that is attributed to you from 2005 where you say that obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem.
It should be solved by means of a radical restructuring of society.
there's no business for Novo Nordisk in that area.
Do you remember saying that?
I remember that. And I believed it at the time.
Yeah. I was not aware at that time of the great difficulty number of people with severe overweight.
I have absolutely no doubt that I said this.
What ultimately changed your mind about developing GLP1s for obesity treatment?
First of all, you get in contact with these individuals that are struggling with this for their entire life, that has an enormous impact on you as an individual.
Then there's also a commercial motive in this.
This is a huge potential commercial market for the company.
So it was composite of patient consideration, but also pursuing a commercial opportunity for the company.
So Novo Nordisk released Wigovi in 2021.
A higher dose of samaglatide approved specifically for weight loss.
In one major trial, patients lost an average of about 15 % of their body weight in just over a year.
And it wasn't just Novo.
Another pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly, had also been working on GLP -1s for years.
And in 2022, they were hot on Novo's heels.
Eli Lilly answered Novosimaglutide with their own compound, terzepatide.
Terzepatide mimics two gut hormones, GLP1 and another one called GIP.
That made terzepatide even more effective.
In the spring of 2022, Eli Lilly released Mt. Giaro, which was approved for type 2 diabetes.
I started taking Mt. Giaro.
And I've lost 65 pounds.
Last year, they came out with Zepbound for weight loss.
Zepbound, made by Eli Lilly, potentially more effective for losing weight than any other drug on the market.
And GLP One medications also got a huge endorsement from one of the most trusted voices in America.
For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport.
Oprah. In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me who have struggled for years with being overweight or with obesity." Suddenly, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly were leading a booming market.
Novo is now the most valuable company in Europe.
It's locked in a race with Lilly to become the first trillion dollar pharmaceutical company by market cap.
And demand for these drugs has gotten so high that Novo and Lilly cannot keep up.
The FDA put samagletide on official shortage list in 2022.
Terzepatide followed just months later.
Here's Novo's Mads -Thompson again.
Did you ever dream that it could be this...
big? My dream—but that was just a dream—was that one day it could be the number one drug class in the world.
And right now, this year, the latest forecast is that the GOP 1 class is actually going to be the number one drug class in the world.
but it's gone surprisingly fast to the extent that neither we nor our peers at Eli Lilly can deliver enough products to satisfy the market.
Pharmacists can't stock the stuff fast enough.
My colleague, Brad Olsen, you heard from him at the start of the episode, he and I called a bunch of pharmacies all over the country.
I'm just calling to see if you have any GOP one drugs in stock like ozim Ifik or Mount Jaro.
No, we don't know. Unfortunately, we do not.
We haven't gotten it in the past few months.
No, it's not available.
I think next month is going to be available.
Literally like every injection right now is so hard to get.
We're out of stock on it.
In all of it? Yeah.
Today, there's no doubt Americans want these drugs, but almost everyone we spoke to for the series, from patients to doctors to lawmakers, pointed to the same big issue, price.
These drugs are very expensive, about $1 ,000 a month out of pocket in the US.
Insurance often won't cover them for weight loss, and it's recommended that the medicine be taken hidden for life, or else studies show people gain the weight back.
My colleague Brad also ran into the affordability issue.
And so you did stop taking Monjaro after about five months.
Why? I would say it's mainly cost. I just can't afford that expense over the course of my lifetime out of pocket.
And so for me, starting without insurance is sort of like a choice where you know in the end that the jig is up, like you're not going to be able to keep taking it.
So how long after your last dose before you started to feel the cravings come back?
It was probably three weeks.
Okay. It became hard because it became like you're kind of without a net.
You know, in the circus, you're on the tightrope and there's no net under you.
You know, and the medicine was like having the net.
You're like, oh I can fall off this tightrope.
No big deal. That's what it feels like.
Brad decided to go without a net.
But as we reported the series, he and I talked to people who weren't so willing to give up a drug that they felt changed their lives, even if it was more than they could afford. OK, if I can't get the drug, what can I take instead?
What's close? And so they resorted to riskier measures.
What I received in the mail was a tiny vial filled with white powder.
Okay. Which could honest to god be anything cause like who knows?
That's next time on Trillion Dollar Shot.
Trillion dollar shot is part of the journal, which is a co -production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.
This episode was hosted by me, Jessica Mendoza, with Bradley Olsen.
It was produced by Matt Kwang with help from Jeevika Verma, additional production from Adrienne Marie Nielsen.
season. This series is edited by Catherine Brewer, fact -checking by Sophie Hurwitz, series art by Pete Ryan, sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard, music in this episode by Peter Leonard and Bobby Lourd. Our theme music is by Sue Wiley, remix for the series by Peter Leonard. special thanks to Maria Byrne, Stephanie Ilgenfritz, Kate Linebaugh, Peter Loftus, Sarah Leo O 'Brien, Enrique Perez -Dilarosa, Sarah Platt, Suunar Rasmasan, Jonathan Sanders, Nathan Singapok, Leying Tang, Rolf Winkler, Liz Esli -White, and Tatiana Zamese.
Thanks for listening.
Episode 2 drops next Sunday, May 19th.
Hey, Wendy here again.
So that was episode one of Trillion Dollar Shot from the Journal.
You can listen to the series by finding the journal wherever you get podcasts.
We'll be back in your ears with an episode of Science Versus in just a couple of days, and we are diving into the science of protein.
How much do you really need to get jacked or to, you know, just be healthy?
It's a really, really fun episode.
I can't wait to share with you.
I'm Wendy Zuckerman.
Back to you in a couple of days.
