Healthy Returns: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk make progress toward boosting weight loss drug supply

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Good afternoon! A highly popular group of weight loss and diabetes drugs are still hard to find in the U.S. The dominant manufacturers of those treatments, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, are making progress toward changing that. 

But Wall Street appears to be more encouraged by one than the other.  

The drugmakers shared supply updates when they reported their financial results for the first quarter. Demand for their weight loss and diabetes medications has far outpaced supply over the last year, forcing the pair to invest heavily to scale up their manufacturing.

Investors cheered Eli Lilly after the company hiked its full-year revenue outlook by $2 billion, in part due to confidence about increased production of its weight loss drug Zepbound, diabetes treatment Mounjaro and similar drugs for the rest of the year. The company refers to those treatments as incretin drugs, which mimic certain gut hormones to suppress a person's appetite and regulate their blood sugar. 

"Now that we're four months into the year, we have greater visibility into that, into these nodes of capacity and feel more confident," Eli Lilly CFO Anat Ashkenazi told investors during an earnings call last week.

She noted that Eli Lilly has several manufacturing sites either "ramping up or under construction," including two locations in North Carolina, two in Indiana, one in Ireland and one in Germany, along with a seventh site the company recently acquired from Nexus Pharmaceuticals. 

Ashkenazi also highlighted the recent approval and upcoming launch of a new delivery device for Mounjaro called KwikPen in Europe and the U.K., which will "unlock new supply