The logo of pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is displayed in front of its offices in Bagsvaerd, Copenhagen, Denmark, on February 4, 2026.
Little Tom | Reuters
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a higher-dose version of NordiskWegovy, the successful weight loss injection, as the company tries to regain market share from its main rival. Eli Lilly.
Novo expects to launch Wegovy's highest dose, 7.2 milligrams, in April. The Danish drugmaker is positioning that version to better compete with Lilly's anti-obesity drug Zepbound, which has been shown to be more effective in promoting weight loss than Wegovy's standard 2.4 milligram dosage.
That greater effectiveness has helped Zepbound become the preferred obesity drug among prescribers and patients, even though it entered the U.S. market later than Wegovy, and has solidified Lilly's position as a dominant player in this space.
High-dose Wegovy helped obese patients lose an average of 20.7% of their weight after 72 weeks in a phase three trial. The standard dose of Wegovy has shown weight loss of around 15% on average in clinical trials.
“I think it really makes it more competitive and really reduces the delta there,” Dr. Jason Brett, Novo Nordisk's chief medical officer in the United States, said in an interview Thursday before the approval.
“But even more importantly, I think it just gives patients another option if they're not meeting their goals and achieving some of these larger weight losses in certain patients,” he added.
In a separate phase three trial in patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes, Wegovy at high doses demonstrated an average weight loss of 14.1%. People with diabetes often have a harder time losing weight than people without the condition.
It marks the first approval of a GLP-1 treatment under the FDA's new national priority voucher plan that aims to reduce drug review times to one to two months for companies the agency says support America's national health priorities. The FDA launched the pilot plan in June.
