India Pharma Outlook Team | Thursday, 07 August 2025
Novo Nordisk has filed 14 new lawsuits aimed at curbing the distribution of unsafe and unapproved compounded drugs falsely claiming to contain semaglutide, the active ingredient in the company’s FDA-approved diabetes and weight-loss medications such as Wegovy and Ozempic.
The lawsuits are aimed at both compounding pharmacies and telehealth providers that are accused of deceiving patients into thinking these unapproved products are FDA-reviewed or have the same safety and efficacy as the approved medicines by Novo Nordisk. Many of these products are allegedly manufactured with illegal foreign active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and have no regulatory scrutiny.
The company claims that specific telehealth companies are breaking state laws by unduly influencing physicians and pushing patients to compounded semaglutide under the claim of "personalized medicine," when the products are actually unapproved knock-offs.
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“Patients deserve safe and effective treatments from companies they can trust,” said Dave Moore, Executive Vice President, US Operations, Novo Nordisk. “No one should risk their health using counterfeit drugs made with ingredients that are not subject to oversight and safety measures.”
To date, Novo Nordisk has filed a total of 132 legal actions in federal courts across 40 states and obtained 44 permanent injunctions preventing defendants from unlawfully compounding and making false and misleading claims in their marketing. Some of these injunctions have required the defendants to forfeit profits earned through illegal actions.
With these new lawsuits, Novo Nordisk is bringing some of the first legal motions against pharmacies and telehealth companies that are recently alleged to have broken state laws as part of a purported medical personalization effort, doubling down on its commitment to patient safety and the integrity of the drug.
