An injection pen of Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s weight reduction drug, is displayed in Recent York City on Dec. 11, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Eli Lilly is suing 4 telehealth corporations selling compounded versions of the pharmaceutical giant’s weight reduction drug Zepbound and its diabetes treatment Mounjaro, the corporate’s latest try to crack down on the booming industry of copycat drugs.
In lawsuits filed Wednesday, Lilly accuses the sites — Mochi Health, Fella Health, Willow Health and Henry Meds — of deceiving consumers about “untested, unapproved drugs” and turning them away from Lilly’s medicines.
Lilly alleges the businesses are claiming to supply personalized options after they are literally mass-marketing barely different versions of Lilly’s drugs to be able to skirt FDA rules. Lilly also claims among the sites are selling formulations of the drugs that have not been studied, equivalent to oral tablets and drops.
Mochi, Fella, Willow and Henry Meds didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Lilly’s diabetes drug Mounjaro went into short supply in late 2022, allowing pharmacies and outsourcing facilities to provide the treatment, a practice called compounding. Novo Nordisk’s weight reduction drug Wegovy was also in brief supply, opening up the marketplace for compounding GLP-1s.
That business boomed online, where people sought versions of the treatments in the event that they couldn’t find the brand names or couldn’t get them covered by insurance. Mass compounding of tirzepatide, the lively ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound, was imagined to stop last month after the Food and Drug Administration declared the shortage of the drugs over.
Some pharmacies kept doing it anyway, producing versions that differ barely from the brand name, which could possibly keep them out of the FDA’s crosshairs. Earlier this month, Lilly sued two pharmacies, alleging they falsely marketed their products as personalized versions of the drugs which were clinically tested and are made using stringent safety standards.
Considered one of the telehealth platforms Lilly is now suing, Mochi Health, planned to proceed selling compounded versions of tirzepatide, betting that offering personalized treatments would keep it out of legal trouble, Mochi CEO Myra Ahmad told CNBC in March.
Asked whether she feared legal motion from Lilly, Ahmad said she wasn’t anxious about her prescribers since “they’ve established patient-physician relationships” and “the fantastic thing about medicine is de facto that they get full autonomy to make a decision what’s the most effective solution to manage their patients.”
Lilly in its filing Wednesday claimed Ahmad shouldn’t be a licensed physician and that Mochi and its “unlicensed owners exercise undue influence and control over, amongst other things, the prescribing decisions of physicians” and in consequence engage within the “illegal corporate practice of drugs.”
Lilly makes an identical allegation against Fella Health, accusing the corporate of constructing “sweeping corporate decisions that dictate patient care, equivalent to when Fella modified patients en masse from one tirzepatide formulation to a different with additives.”
In all 4 cases, Lilly is searching for to stop the sites from marketing or selling tirzepatide. Nevertheless it could take months, and even longer, for the cases to make their way through the courts.
