Is Your GLP-1 Strategy Future-Proof?
Six rapid-fire shifts every founder, operator, and investor needs to know
Hello, and happy Sunday!
If you’ve watched the news these past two weeks, your head’s probably spinning from the White House’s on-again, off-again talk of drug tariffs. Mine certainly was: I rewrote — and re-rewrote — my GLP-1 pricing essay three times before I finally hit “publish” (turns out presidential tweets are not a stable citation source). The piece is live now, and if you caught any discrepancies, congratulations: you witnessed policy whiplash in real time.
Below, you’ll find the six moves that mattered most in GLP-1 land this week.
💊 Orforglipron moves the needle (and you can leave the needles at home) - In ACHIEVE-1, Lilly enrolled 559 adults with type 2 diabetes (baseline A1C ≈ 8.0 %). After 40 weeks the once-daily pill:
Dropped A1C by 1.3 – 1.6 percentage points versus 0.1 % on placebo
Cut body-weight 16 lbs (7.9 %) at the top 36 mg dose
Showed a GI side-effect profile that looks textbook-GLP-1 (mild-to-mod nausea 13-18 %, diarrhea 19-26 %) with no liver safety signal—a Pfizer-style scare this is not
Wall Street loved the news. LLY popped ~14 % intraday, adding ≈ $90 B in market cap and reminding the other Pharma giants who holds the GLP-1 cards.
For tele-clinics, a room-temperature pill you can ship in a padded envelope (no refrigeration, no sharps) is like Christmas come early. Lilly says its Lebanon, IN mega-plant can crank this out “at global scale,” so start updating those 2026 forecasts now.
🍲 Appetite Adjustments — GLP-1s are quietly nuking 700+ calories a day - A new Food Quality & Preference survey of 1,955 U.S. adults—split into current GLP-1 users, former users and never-touched-the-stuff controls—shows just how hard these drugs hit the dinner plate.
Women on GLP-1s reported eating about 865 fewer calories a day, men about 760 fewer. That deficit comes mostly from ghosting the usual suspects: processed snacks, sugary sodas, refined grains, even a decent chunk of beef.
However, taste-tests showed these patients still rated those foods highly—they just couldn’t be bothered to lift the fork. Meanwhile fruit, leafy greens, and plain water saw a significant bump, suggesting the drugs mute impulse rather than erase preference.
This is ugly math for Coca-Cola and Mcdonalds, but a tail-wind for anyone selling fiber gummies, protein shakes or “GLP-1-friendly” meal kits.
⚖️ Eli Lilly sues 4 GLP-1 Telehealth start-ups - The pharma giants are suing Mochi Health, Fella / Delilah, Willow, and Henry Meds for still hawking compounded tirzepatide even after FDA ruled that the branded drug is back in stock. Lilly’s pitch to the judge was these aren’t personalized doses—they’re mass-made knock-offs that dodge trials, labels, and safety checks. The FDA has already ordered compounders to halt bulk tirzepatide (deadlines hit in April-May), and courts have sided with brand owners in similar semaglutide cases.
🧪 D2C Alchemy - Christina Farr’s verdict is that the age of “spray-and-pray on Facebook” is toast for D2C health tech companies. Farr argues that Ad costs keep climbing, cookies are kaput, and VCs twitch when your CAC line looks like a Meta earnings chart.
Growth that sticks now starts with warm referrals—Primary care physicians, specialists and other HCP’s- with sprinkles of just enough paid search to tag those patients who immediately Google you, plus credibility-boosting SEO and intimate IRL meet-ups. Do all that on top of excellent clinical care (see Cerebral’s flame-out if you doubt the importance), and your lifetime value easily outpaces acquisition cost, while ad-heavy competitors keep burning cash for ever-pricier clicks.
📈 Retention Reflex - Side-effects, not Facebook CAC—are the real LTV assassins in GLP-1 telehealth. Blue Cross numbers show one-third of patients quit by week 4 and nearly 50 % ghost before week 12.
In my latest piece I lay out the antidote for founders: predict who will suffer, adjust doses before patients get nauseous and give them smaller, flexible hits.
🇺🇸 Tariff Tantrum? More like pocket change - Headlines scream “200 % import duty on Ozempic!” but the math says no. The tariff hits the $100 wholesale API transfer price, not the $1,300 list price for GLP-1’s in the US. More importantly, Novo can’t jack retail prices without ceding turf to Lilly, and Lilly can’t hike without handing it back. Both giants are locked in a stare-down. Neither side dares blink, so list prices stay put and patients keep paying what they pay today.