Chinese firms supply US weight-loss drugs

Demand opens door for eight companies

- PATRICK WINGROVE

Some Chinese companies now racing to make generic versions of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy also supplied ingredients for more than a billion makeshift doses of weight-loss drugs sold online in the US over the past two years, according to three sources and a Reuters review of shipping and public records.

Cheap copies of Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound are on the retreat in the US as regulators restrict their sale, slowing shipments from Chinese suppliers of the raw ingredients that allowed for explosive growth of the medicines.

Robert Califf, who had two stints leading the US Food and Drug Administration, said never before had a new drug become so wildly popular that the manufacturer simply couldn’t keep up.

The shortage opened the door for compounding pharmacies, turbocharged by telehealth firms that flourished during the Covid pandemic, to supply cheap copies to a huge market chasing the promised weight loss.

The pivot to FDA-approved generics as patents expire in various countries follows a year of soaring demand for the branded drugs, which have been shown to help people shed as much as 20% of their weight.

At least eight Chinese companies, including publicly traded Jiangsu Sinopep-Allsino Biopharmaceutical and Hybio Pharmaceutical, helped flood the US with raw semaglutide and tirzepatide, the main ingredients in Wegovy and Zepbound, respectively, sources told Reuters. A Reuters analysis of US EDA shipping records backs that up.