An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injection pen placed in the Brooklyn borough of New York on March 28, 2024.
Shelby Knowles | Bloomberg | fake images
Eli Lilly on Monday launched a new form of its blockbuster anti-obesity drug, Zepbound, offering a month's worth of doses in a single pen.
Patients who pay cash can get the multi-dose device, called KwikPen, on the company's direct-to-consumer website, LillyDirect. Prices start at $299 per month for the lowest dosage level.
The pen could serve as a more convenient option for some patients, as it reduces the number of devices they have to use in a month to take the medication. Patients can use one pen to take four weekly doses of Zepbound.
Currently, patients undergoing treatment use a different single-dose autoinjector device each week. Lilly also offers single-dose vials of Zepbound, which require users to draw the medication into a syringe and inject it themselves.
The announcement comes as Lilly works to maintain the early success of Zepbound, which has seen demand skyrocket since it first entered the market in late 2023. LillyDirect has been key to Zepbound's growth, and launching a new form of the drug on the platform could attract even more patients.
Zepbound's torrid growth has helped Eli Lilly seize a majority share of the weight-loss drug market from rival Novo Nordisk. In the company's fourth quarter, Zepbound generated $4.2 billion in U.S. revenue, a 122% increase from a year ago.
In a statement, Lilly said the Food and Drug Administration approved an expansion of Zepbound's label to include the multidose device.
The KwikPen is already used for other medications, such as Lilly's popular diabetes drug Mounjaro.
“As part of our commitment to supporting people living with obesity in their weight management journey, we are introducing a new option with the Zepbound KwikPen, a device trusted by patients around the world and in the United States for other Lilly medications,” Ilya Yuffa, president of Lilly USA and Global Customer Capabilities, said in the release.
