Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks says the pharma giant has learned from its past mistakes and is already planning a Zepbound successor
Skyrocketing sales of tirzepatide — the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound — transformed Eli Lilly $LLY into the most valuable pharmaceutical company in the world, however CEO David Ricks says the company is looking ahead to a successor of the blockbuster drug.
“Lilly’s got a lead,” Ricks told the Wall Street Journal in an interview, “and we plan to exploit that lead.”
Tirzepatide is a GLP-1 medication, the same class as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, and is used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. In 2023, sales of Mounjaro and Zepbound reached $5.3 billion and they’re still soaring this year.
Eli Lilly is currently the tenth-largest company in the world by market cap at a value of $836 billion.
Unrelenting demand for GLP-1 drugs has led to ongoing shortages. The pharma giant has committed billions of dollars to build new facilities to keep up with demand.
The company is also facing a new competitive threat, as several pharma companies are racing to disrupt the weight-loss duopoly held by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
However, Ricks said the company has learned from its past missteps — fiscally speaking. He recalled how Eli Lilly lost its edge in mental-health medication profits after the patent of its blockbuster antidepressant Prozac expired in 2001. Without a successor, generics dried up Eli Lilly’s Prozac sales.
This time, Eli Lilly has nine obesity and diabetes drugs in development.
Ricks told the Wall Street Journal that he has high hopes for retatrutide, which is currently in phase 3 trials.
He claimed that it “has a strong effect on visceral fat and liver obesity and other really difficult-to-treat types of obesity. As a result, you lose even more weight than tirzepatide.”
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