🌏 The weight-loss drug race

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ByQuartz Staff

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Image for article titled 🌏 The weight-loss drug race — Photo: Mario Tama (Getty Images)

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The Great “Stall” of China. After initial progress in U.S.-China trade negotiations, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that talks between the two nations have “stalled.”

GLP-1 — and done?

Novo Nordisk made Ozempic a household name, helped turn GLP-1s into a $100-plus billion market, and rode the weight-loss wave all the way to an all-time stock high last summer. Now, it’s watching that wave crash.

The Danish drugmaker — once the undisputed king of injectable weight-loss drugs — is suddenly trailing rival Eli Lilly in prescriptions, pipeline innovation, and investor confidence. After a yearlong stock slide that wiped out 50% of Novo Nordisk’s value, CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen was ousted. Still, the company says that it’s not changing its strategy, which has some analysts scratching their heads.

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly is on the offense: selling discount Zepbound directly to consumers, fast-tracking an oral GLP-1 pill, and prepping a triple-action shot that could outpace anything on the market.

So what happened?

Analysts say Novo Nordisk didn’t see the demand tsunami coming. Its blockbuster Wegovy launch stalled on supply-chain issues, leaving room for Zepbound (Lilly’s injectable) and a flood of cheaper compounded versions from telehealth startups. And when Novo’s next big thing (CagriSema) underwhelmed in trials, some investors realized the Danish pharma giant might be fresh out of magic injections. Quartz’s Harri Weber has more on Novo Nordisk’s big slim down.

Searching for a loophole

On the final day of its landmark antitrust trial, Google may have found an unlikely ally: artificial intelligence.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who will soon rule on whether or not Google illegally monopolized search, asked DOJ lawyers whether tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity represent a new kind of search engine — or something new entirely. The subtext: If the market is already shifting on its own, maybe Google doesn’t need a government-mandated reset.

Mehta’s question cuts to the heart of the case. The DOJ wants Google to face structural penalties for monopolizing online search through multibillion-dollar default placement deals. But Google says the world is moving on. Search isn’t just links anymore. It’s a chatbot. It’s a summary box. It’s a conversation.

Now, the same tech threatening Google’s core business might also save it in court — by making the whole idea of a “search monopoly” look outdated. Mehta’s ruling is due in August. And whatever he decides could shape not just Google’s fate but the future of how we find anything online. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on Google’s potential get-out-of-antitrust-free card.