SAN FRANCISCO: Pfizer is preparing for a consumer market for obesity drugs on par with the booming business it saw after it launched erectile dysfunction drug Viagra in 1998, chief executive officer Albert Bourla says.
Bourla said that even when the drugmaker was negotiating its purchase of weight-loss drugmaker Metsera, initially announced in September 2025, Pfizer did not expect the cash-pay market for obesity drugs currently dominated by Eli Lilly and Co and Novo Nordisk to get so big, so fast.
“Both Lilly and Novo presented their sales and had significant sales outside the reimbursement system. Basically, outside the United States, we were calculating very limited sales,” Bourla said, speaking to a group of reporters during the J P Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
“Now we see that this operates almost like Viagra, where people were willing to pay and buy it, although it was not reimbursed at all.”
Pfizer developed and sold Viagra, which is now sold mostly as a generic drug, for years, but spun off the business that controls the brand in 2020.
Pfizer has said it does not expect to return to revenue growth until 2029, as it works to develop new blockbuster drugs, including the obesity treatments it picked up in the US$10bil acquisition of Metsera.
The company announced earlier that it plans to launch 10 different phase three studies of obesity compounds from Metsera by the end of the year, including one it launched in November. It bought Metsera for up to US$10bil after winning a bidding war against Novo.
“We are all on obesity,” Bourla said. “We invested. We have good expertise in commercial, good expertise in development and good expertise in discovery.”
Pfizer has said it expects the next few years to be bumpy, due to the expiration of patents on key drugs, lower sales from its Covid-19 business and price cuts promised to the US government.
It was the first major pharmaceutical company to sign a deal with the Trump administration to lower the price of its prescription drugs in the Medicaid programme in exchange for three years of tariff relief.
Bourla said the government deals, which require drugmakers to offer their new medicines at the same price in the United States as overseas, will help companies put pressure on European countries to increase what they will pay for drugs.
“Do you reduce the (US) prices to France’s level or stop supplying France? You stop supplying France,” Bourla said. “So they will stay without new medicines because the system will force us not to be able to accept the lower prices.” — Reuters
