Eli Lilly CFO Anat Ashkenazi on managing soaring demand for GLP-1s

A pharmacist holds boxs of Eli Lilly & Co. Mounjaro brand tirzepatide medication arranged at a pharmacy in Provo, Utah, US, on Monday, Nov. 27, 2023. 

George Frey | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Skyrocketing demand for a category of weight reduction and diabetes treatments has lifted Eli Lilly to recent heights over the past 12 months. However the drugmaker has far more work it desires to do with that hard-won success, outgoing Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi told CNBC. 

Ashkenazi, who will step in as the brand new CFO of Alphabet on July 31, has been key to managing the windfall in revenue and wave of investor optimism from Eli Lilly’s diabetes injection Mounjaro and recently launched obesity drug Zepbound. Ashkenazi took over as CFO at Eli Lilly in 2021 after roughly twenty years with the pharmaceutical giant. She was included on CNBC’s inaugural Changemakers list earlier this 12 months.

“You have got to be a very good student of the business and understand it in and out and understand the industry,” she told CNBC in an interview before her departure announcement. “Only once we understand the total system, can we navigate it well in order that we bring value to it…That is my role as CFO.”

Her tenure hasn’t come without challenges: Eli Lilly and rival Novo Nordisk have each struggled to fabricate enough supply of their treatments to satisfy unprecedented demand, causing nationwide shortages of those drugs. 

Their weekly injections are a part of a category of medication called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic certain hormones produced within the gut to suppress an individual’s appetite and regulate their blood sugar. Some analysts expect the marketplace for those drugs to be price $100 billion by the top of the last decade. 

Eli Lilly’s boom in revenue has allowed the corporate to speculate heavily to scale up manufacturing, which is able to eventually get more medicine into patients’ hands, Ashkenazi said. 

“As we start selling product and we get the revenue in and money flow related to that sale,” the corporate desires to “funnel that money flow back to the business to speculate in those manufacturing facilities,” she said. 

Eli Lilly doesn’t expect to match the pace of demand this 12 months and perhaps not even in 2025, Ashkenazi said at a conference in March. However the pharmaceutical giant has made encouraging progress to this point. 

An Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is pictured in Branchburg, Latest Jersey, on March 5, 2021.

Mike Segar | Reuters

Ashkenazi said Eli Lilly has several manufacturing sites either under construction or “ramping up,” including two locations in North Carolina, two in Indiana, one in Ireland and one in Germany, together with a seventh site the corporate recently acquired from Nexus Pharmaceuticals. Eli Lilly late last month also said it might invest one other $5.3 billion in its manufacturing plant in Lebanon, Indiana. 

Those facilities add to the corporate’s “existing, very large” manufacturing footprint across the U.S. and Europe, Ashkenazi said. Since 2020, Eli Lilly has spent greater than $18 billion to construct, expand and buy manufacturing plants in those regions, the corporate said in May.

Ashkenazi noted that Eli Lilly can also be tackling one other barrier to patient access: limited insurance coverage for weight reduction drugs within the U.S. 

Some employers and other health plans are still reluctant to cover GLP-1s for weight reduction attributable to their hefty price tags, which they are saying could significantly strain their budgets. Insurers also produce other questions, corresponding to how long patients actually stay on the treatments. 

Still, Ashkenazi said coverage of Zepbound by U.S. industrial insurers is improving, with about 67% industrial coverage as of April 1. Eli Lilly is working to construct that access for the rest of the patients, she noted. 

“It isn’t enough to have a highly efficacious, secure drug that may truly change people’s healthcare – but in addition make it accessible,” Ashkenazi said. 

She also hopes that patients enrolled within the federal Medicare program will eventually see increased coverage for weight reduction drugs as Eli Lilly and other drugmakers exhibit their ability to treat a big selection of obesity-related conditions. 

Eli Lilly is studying tirzepatide, the lively ingredient in Zepbound and Mounjaro, in patients with obesity and fatty liver disease, obstructive sleep apnea, chronic kidney disease and heart failure, amongst other health conditions. 

Under recent guidance issued in March, Medicare Part D plans can cover obesity treatments that receive regulatory approval for a further health profit. Medicare prescription drug plans administered by private insurers, often called Part D, currently cannot cover those drugs for weight reduction alone.

An even bigger issue at hand is a long-held misconception that obesity is a “lifestyle alternative” reasonably than a chronic disease, in response to Ashkenazi.

Eli Lilly is trying to vary that. 

“Our goal is to be sure that society, the health-care system and patients themselves actually view this and understand that it’s a chronic disease…and subsequently needs to be treated as such,” Ashkenazi said.