The moment has arrived: generic versions of the miracle weight-loss drug semaglutide, best known under its corporate trade names Ozempic and Wegovy, are now beginning to appear on Canadian pharmacy shelves. This development may provide fresh data on one of the great unresolved questions of our time: was Novo Nordisk’s unnecessary loss of its exclusive Canadian rights to the drug a mistake, or an intentional strategy?
I call it a “great” question intentionally. Most major events or developments in human history can be seen either as an inevitable result of long-accumulating structural forces, or as a contingent and accidental thing that came about by happenstance. Usually there’s no right answer, because we’re limited in our ability to investigate counterfactuals. It is perfectly valid to see the carnage of the First World War as being a logical and necessary implication of weaknesses in the post-Napoleonic settlement of European states that happened a century before. It is equally valid to suggest that if the Archduke Ferdinand’s driver had taken a different turn on June 28, 1914, the war might not have come about at all.
Canada’s Ozempic Question
How did we come to be the first Western country to have a competitive market in semaglutide? This question is a bit like that. The story was originally cracked open a year ago by pharmacochemist and news analyst Derek Lowe, who noticed an interview with a Sandoz Group executive mentioning that Novo Nordisk seemingly let its guard down in the Canadian market. Lowe ran down the Canadian paper trail and confirmed that Novo Nordisk had failed to pay a fee of a few hundred dollars to obtain a routine extension on its Canadian patent. It thus lost about two years’ worth of protection from the underpriced generic rivals that are now materializing.
The Happenstance Hypothesis
That became the popularly accepted version of the story. Someone at Novo Nordisk had screwed up some paperwork, at a cost possibly amounting to nine or ten digits. Canada is often said to be the second-largest market for semaglutide, not just because of medium-high domestic obesity prevalence but because we’re pressed flat up against the United States like an unlucky airline passenger.
However, as the popular “happenstance” hypothesis spread on social media, analysts and lawyers in the drug trade began to push back, pointing out that a company the size of Novo Nordisk has unfathomably complicated and rigorous systems to track and defend the status of its patents in all countries of any significant size. Me, I don’t have any special knowledge of drug economics: my prejudice is that it’s obviously possible that there was a slip-up, and there’s a faint scent of turf defence by the intellectual-property experts here. Drug companies have complicated IP-defence systems because keeping track of the world’s legal landscapes is inherently complicated; but, for the moment, and perhaps only for a moment, those systems are still made of human beings, who are subject to biological laziness and stubbornness and flakiness.
