(Amends procurement, adds corporate statement in paragraph 3)
By Sriparna Roy and Christy Santhosh
Aug 14 (Reuters) – Eli Lilly has sent cease-and-desist letters to U.S. health care providers in recent days asking them to stop promoting combination versions of its weight-loss and diabetes drugs as their availability increases, the company said on Wednesday.
The letters were sent to telemedicine companies, wellness centers and medical spas that sold compounded versions of the drugmaker’s popular Zepbound and Mounjaro treatments, a spokesman told Reuters.
“When FDA-approved drugs are ‘commercially available,’ drug manufacturers cannot regularly make ‘substantially a copy’ of them,” the company said in the emailed statement.
Prescription drugs are customized medications based on the same ingredients as brand-name drugs. Because Zepbound and Mounjaro, both chemically known as tirzepatide, were in short supply, they could be legally manufactured by licensed pharmacies in the United States.
Rising demand for slimming drugs from Lilly and Danish competitor Novo Nordisk, which have been shown to help patients lose up to 20 percent of their weight, has prompted numerous sellers to offer ready-made preparations that can cost more than $1,000 per month.
Lilly and Novo have already
In total, the companies have sued over three dozen medical spas, slimming clinics, pharmacies and online retailers to prevent them from selling products that supposedly contain the active ingredients of their drugs.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has listed all doses of Lilly’s drugs as available, but has not removed them from the shortage drug list.
A dose of Novo’s weight loss drug Wegovy is currently on the FDA’s shortage list.
The FDA said in an emailed response that it is currently working to determine whether the available supply of tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound, meets its definition of a resolved shortage.
Bloomberg, which first reported the news, said several inpatient clinics had also received letters from Lilly asking them to stop “manufacturing, advertising and/or selling” compounded versions of Mounjaro and Zepbound. (Reporting by Sriparna Roy and Christy Santhosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore, Patrick Wingrove and Anil D’Siva)
