> By chance I just talked to someone with deeper knowledge on this and they said the current constraint is actually ramping up supply of the delivery mechanism, not the drug.
The article says this:
> Surprisingly, the study found that the biggest cost in producing Ozempic is not the active medicine, called semaglutide, but the disposable pens used to inject it. They can be made for no more than $2.83 per month’s supply, the authors concluded, based on interviews with former employees and consultants to injection device manufacturers. One Ozempic pen is used weekly and lasts a month.
So while the injection pens are significantly more expensive than manufacturing the drug itself, they are still relatively cheap. So it seems to be not a major problem to strongly ramp up production here as well.
Which suggests any supply shortage will be resolved relatively quickly. Perhaps in less than a year? Then the limiting factor will not be the supply but the market price.
There are also doctors that are prescribing vials of semaglutide and commodity needles, and training patients to properly dose up and administer the drug via a standard needle. There's more to it than the auto-injector pens, but not that much more to it. And it does bring costs down, which is important to some. Alternatively, you can just go to the doctor's office weekly and have a nurse there do a traditional injection for you (doesn't help as much with costs, but does bypass the auto-injector shortage).
I agree needles can alleviate the Ozempic shortage, though only if Novo Nordisk decides to sell Ozempic without pens. But not including pens will hardly reduce the price of Ozempic anyway, because pens cost basically nothing (estimated USD 2.83 for a month) compared to the full price of the drug.
The marginal cost to produce the few milligrams of the drug that goes into the pens is much much less than $2.83; it's on the order of cents. Plus, scaling up manufacturing of the drug is easier than scaling up manufacturing of the auto-injectors (which have a decent number of parts in them). The auto-injectors really are the bottleneck, and manufacturing of them so far has not been able to be ramped up quickly enough.
The article says this:
> Surprisingly, the study found that the biggest cost in producing Ozempic is not the active medicine, called semaglutide, but the disposable pens used to inject it. They can be made for no more than $2.83 per month’s supply, the authors concluded, based on interviews with former employees and consultants to injection device manufacturers. One Ozempic pen is used weekly and lasts a month.
So while the injection pens are significantly more expensive than manufacturing the drug itself, they are still relatively cheap. So it seems to be not a major problem to strongly ramp up production here as well.
Which suggests any supply shortage will be resolved relatively quickly. Perhaps in less than a year? Then the limiting factor will not be the supply but the market price.