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Patent protection for Wegovy — Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster weight loss drug, which contains the second generation GLP-1 active ingredient and is at least twice as effective — is expected to expire by the decade’s end.

Michael Siluk | UCG | Getty Images

For Gray Beard, a kindergarten teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, losing weight had become a grueling task. She’d tried five different programs in her life and never found lasting results.

Her luck started to change last year, when she saw a promotion on Instagram for the Ro Body Program, a new offering from online health startup Ro. The ad said eligible patients could get prescribed GLP-1s, the buzzy class of obesity treatments that’s turned into a booming business in recent years.

Beard, 47, had previously sought a GLP-1 prescription, but her doctor “wouldn’t even try” to get it approved, assuming her insurance company would reject coverage of the costly medication, she said. GLP-1s cost roughly $1,000 per month before insurance and other rebates. 

Customers of Ro’s Body Program could get prescribed a GLP-1, such as Novo Nordisk ‘s weight loss drug Wegovy or diabetes treatment Ozempic, and meet monthly with a doctor. They also get access to an educational curriculum, 24/7 messaging, one-on-one coaching with nurses and assistance with navigating insurance complexities. 

Beard was 210 pounds when she first started the program early last year. She’s since lost 40 pounds and serves as an ambassador for Ro. She pays $30 per month for the GLP-1 treatment, after insurance coverage, along with a $145 monthly fee for the program. And she has no plans to leave.

“I’m fine if I have to stay on it forever,” Beard told CNBC.

Ro, founded as Roman in 2017, is part of a growing crop of digital health companies aiming to capitalize on the soaring demand for GLP-1s by building programs and services for users on top of the medications. The opportunity could be massive. Goldman Sachs analysts expect 15 million U.S. adults to be on anti-obesity drugs by 2030, and predict the industry could reach $100 billion in annual revenue by that time.

In addition to Wegovy and Ozempic, the GLP-1 class includes Eli Lilly’s highly popular weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro. GLP-1s mimic a hormone produced in the gut to suppress a person’s appetite and regulate blood sugar.

Like Ro, other non-drugmakers, including Calibrate, Sesame, Omada Health, Noom, Hims & Hers and even telehealth industry veterans Teladoc Health and WeightWatchers, have rolled out offerings geared toward patients on GLP-1s, or have expanded their services to include the popular medications.

Meanwhile, investors are cheering them on.

Shares of Ro competitor Hims & Hers popped 28% on May 20 after the company said it’s now offering compounded GLP-1 injections in addition to its oral medication kits. CEO Andrew Dudum told CNBC the company is confident customers will be able to access a consistent supply of the injections. 

Dr. Craig Primack talks Hims & Hers launching its own GLP-1 offering as demand rises

Supply shortages are one of the big hurdles for companies in the market, as spiking demand has made it difficult for many patients to access the treatments. There’s also been a rise of counterfeit products, according to the World Health Organization, which said in January that the combination of shortages and the “increased circulation of falsified versions” is particularly problematic for patients with Type 2 diabetes who count on the medication for disease management.

That’s not slowing down industry executives like Ro founder Zachariah Reitano.

Ro didn’t start out as a company focused on weight loss. Reitano launched it to sell treatments online for erectile dysfunction before moving on to hair loss and other pathologies.

In 2020, Ro switched to obesity management and, after Wegovy was approved by the Food and Drug Adminstration the following year, Reitano said patient inquiries started pouring in by the “tens of thousands.”

Now, Ro is shoveling marketing dollars into its GLP-1 program — from digital ads, TV commercials and posters lining subway stations, to influencer campaigns featuring patients such as Beard. 

Reitano told CNBC that GLP-1s are like a “jetpack for positive behavior change.” Patients tend to exercise more, eat healthier and see around a 30% reduction in calorie intake, he said.

“Once you get a little bit of momentum, once you lose a little bit of weight, you’re sleeping better, you have more energy, you can go to the gym, you can eat better and then that’s that positive flywheel,” Reitano said.

Ro has raised around $1 billion in funding to date, according to PitchBook. The company was valued at about $7 billion as of early 2022, though that was before a steep drop in tech stocks and collapse in the initial public offering market forced many startups to dramatically lower their valuations.

WeightWatchers joins the market

WeightWatchers has been in business for over 60 years and is the name in the U.S. perhaps most synonymous with weight loss programs.

In December, the company entered the GLP-1 market, with a behavioral-support program that’s available through its general membership subscription, starting at $23 per month. Members can participate whether they get a GLP-1 prescription through their primary care physician or through the new WeightWatchers Clinic, introduced alongside the behavioral program.

Because GLP-1s suppress appetites, WeightWatchers quickly learned that it needed an entirely new program for people taking the meds, said Gary Foster, the company’s chief scientific officer.

“They don’t need help with what to do for dessert or how to deal with the bread on the table at a restaurant,” Foster said in an interview. “That’s like 50-60% of what we would do for people without meds.” 

Clinic members who participate in the GLP-1 program have to pay an additional fee — starting at $99 a month — for exclusive access to registered dieticians, fitness professionals and care team coordinators. 

WeightWatchers said in its first-quarter results earlier this month that 87,000 people had subscribed to the clinic, although not all of them are taking GLP-1s. The company expects to have between 140,000 and 160,000 clinic subscribers by year-end, the report said. 

It hasn’t been enough to change WeightWatchers’ trajectory. The stock has plummeted 83% this year on concerns about the company’s debt load, its core weight loss business and Oprah Winfrey’s announced departure from the board in February.

With respect to GLP-1s and their impact on weight loss, “the landscape is quite exciting,” Foster said. “I think we should all celebrate and really be delighted by the fact that there are more tools in the toolbox to help people trying to manage their weight.” 

Kim Gradwell with an Ozempic injection needle at her home in Dudley, North Tyneside, Britain, October 31, 2023. 

Lee Smith | Reuters

Jennifer VanGilder, a 51-year-old economics professor at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, said she’d tried countless methods to lose weight, from strict diets to services like the defunct Jenny Craig. She was considering bariatric surgery before she came across a program from digital health startup Calibrate.   

Calibrate, founded in 2019, was one of the first companies to treat obesity by combining GLP-1s with one-on-one coaching. The program costs $199 a month, which doesn’t include the medication, and requires an initial three-month-long commitment.

VanGilder signed up nearly four years ago and started taking the weekly diabetes injection Ozempic specifically for weight loss. She later switched to Wegovy. 

VanGilder said GLP-1s aren’t a miracle drug, but by taking them and putting in the work, she said she lost around 100 pounds of her 242-pound weight. The big difference between Calibrate and prior weight loss efforts, VanGilder said, is that she doesn’t feel like she’s dieting.

“That’s why I’ve been able to stay on it for as long as I have,” VanGilder said.

Calibrate is one of the only companies to regularly release reports detailing the results of its weight loss program. The company’s 2024 report examined data from roughly 16,000 members who completed at least one year of the program as of October, along with a smaller group of patients who continued for longer. 

Average weight loss among patients was 16.2% at 12 months in the program, 17.3% at 18 months and 17.9% at 24 months, according to the report. 

“Our data of proven outcomes shows that we can deliver faster, better results than some of the leading GLP-1 clinical trials,” said Dr. Kristin Baier, Calibrate’s vice president of clinical development, in an interview.

But Calibrate has hit some major speed bumps in the past couple years.

After raising $100 million in venture funding during the peak of the tech market in 2021, the combination of supply shortages, insurance challenges and the broader market swoon forced the startup to lay off hundreds of employees between 2022 and 2023. The company was acquired in October at a discount by private equity firm Madryn Asset Management.

Calibrate CEO Rob MacNaughton said the sector was “ill equipped” to manage the “dramatic demand that led to, at some point, severely, severely constrained supply” of GLP-1s last year. 

Under new ownership, the company continues to promote its GLP-1 service, which its said is important because the drugs themselves aren’t sufficient.

“GLP-1 medications, while they are safe and effective, they are a tool,” said Baier. “They are not the entire treatment.”

Options for patients

Ro’s Reitano said shortages of Wegovy and other GLP-1s last year prompted his company to temporarily pause advertising. Ro also dolled out refunds and credits to patients in its program who weren’t able to pick up their medication within 30 days of receiving a prescription, he said. 

Reitano said Ro has built up “both technical tools and operations” to help patients navigate supply issues. That includes transferring prescriptions to different pharmacies based on their GLP-1 supply and proximity to a patient. From July to August, the company made 50,000 phone calls to pharmacies across the U.S. to coordinate those transfers, Reitano said. 

Ro has also expanded its medication offerings, adding Zepbound following its U.S. approval in November. 

“We added that to our formulary, and that’s really when we started advertising again because we had confidence that we’d be able to get patients an option,” Reitano said. 

Ro CEO on telehealth and the impact of weight loss drugs

Insurance problems persist, though.

Some employers have dropped weight loss drugs from their plans due to the costs associated with covering the treatments for thousands of patients. The federal Medicare program by law can’t cover weight loss drugs unless the prescription is for another approved health benefit, such as diabetes or cardiovascular health. 

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk offer commercial savings card programs that aim to expand access to their GLP-1s. Eli Lilly allows people with insurance coverage for Zepbound to pay as low as $25 for a monthly prescription. And users who can’t get insurance coverage, may be able to get the drug for as low as $550 a month.

The high costs and difficult access led Hims & Hers to initially stay out of the GLP-1 market even after launching its new weight loss program in December

Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight management at Hims, said the company decided to offer treatment regimens based on drugs that had been studied and prescribed for decades.  

“We’re going to have people, for one reason or another, who either don’t want an injection at this point, or are just looking for a different alternative,” Primack told CNBC in an interview in March. “These are tools we’ve been using in our field for a long, long time.”

Last week, Hims said customers can now access compounded GLP-1 medications via a prescription from a licensed health-care provider on the platform. Hims said it plans to make branded GLP-1 medications available to its customers once supply is consistently available. The company’s oral medication kits start at $79 a month, and its compounded GLP-1 injections will start at $199 a month.

Dudum said the company has partnered with one of the largest generic manufacturers in the U.S. and has a certain degree of exclusivity with the facility. The manufacturer has FDA oversight, he said. 

Even before Hims introduced compounded GLP-1 injections to its weight loss offering, the company said it expects the program will generate more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.

Beard, the Ro customer, has had to make some changes since starting the Body Program. She initially took Wegovy with no out-of-pocket costs, thanks to her insurance coverage and a savings card program from Novo Nordisk. But she hit a plateau on the drug, so she switched to Zepbound. 

While there have been some hiccups along the way, Beard says the program has largely been a “seamless” addition to her day-to-day life, and that she no longer thinks about food all the time. She even got a family member to enroll.

“We’re not having any bad side effects, so why go off of it?” she said, adding “it’s helped both of us get to the weight we want.”

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The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

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The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

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When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

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Astronomer board investigating CEO Andy Byron after viral Coldplay kiss cam video

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Astronomer board investigating CEO Andy Byron after viral Coldplay kiss cam video

PERTH, AUSTRALIA – NOVEMBER 18: Chris Martin of Coldplay performs on stage at Optus Stadium on November 18, 2023 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)

Paul Kane | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Astronomer, a provider of open-source technologies that was hardly known until this week, said on Friday that it’s launched an investigation after CEO Andy Byron was shown on video at a Coldplay concert in an intimate embrace with the company’s head of human relations.

“The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly,” the company said in a post on X.

“Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability,” the company said.

The post comes a day after videos went viral on social media that showed Byron on a big screen at the concert in Boston. Byron, who is married, had his arms around Kristin Cabot, the company’s chief people officer.

Seconds after showing up on the big screen, the pair ducked and hid their faces.

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Byron and Cabot have been put on leave, according to a report Friday from Axios.

Astronomer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In May, Astronomer announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

The company, which is behind the open-source data operations platform Astro, relocated its headquarters last year to New York from Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Ether and trading stocks take the crypto spotlight as Congress passes historic stablecoin bill

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Ether and trading stocks take the crypto spotlight as Congress passes historic stablecoin bill

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Ether and other crypto related stocks climbed to end the week as the GENIUS Act heads to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law. Bitcoin and its proxies took a breather.

The price of ether was last higher by 3.6% at $3,558.68, according to Coin Metrics, trading at highs not seen since January.

On Thursday, ETFs tracking the price of ether saw daily inflows top those of bitcoin ETFs for the first time ever. The funds logged $602 million in net inflows, led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA). Bitcoin ETFs on the same day saw inflows of $522 million. A day earlier, the ETH funds saw a single-day record inflow of $726.7 million.

Stocks tied to crypto trading gained as well. Coinbase rose 4%, hitting an all-time intraday high surpassing its initial pop on its IPO date in 2021, and pacing for its fifth positive week in a row. Robinhood also added 4%. Ether treasury stock Bitmine Immersion continued its rally, jumping 12% Friday.

Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin slipped 1%. Bitcoin treasury giant Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, fell 4% and Mara Holdings, the mining company and bitcoin proxy, hovered under the flat line.

Ether has advanced 19% this week, bringing its two week gain to about 43.6% — its strongest two-week period since August 2021. Bitcoin is down less than 1% for the week.

“No coin seems to have more [momentum] than Ethereum of late,” Wolfe Research’s Read Harvey said in a note this week. “We began suggesting it was time to start gaining exposure in May, as ETH began to show some life relative to BTC. Fast forward to today, and we’re not just seeing life, but a potential trend reversal.”

Now trading near five-month highs relative to bitcoin, the leadership pendulum in crypto may be shifting, he added.

On Thursday, the House passed a bundle of crypto bills, sending one, the stablecoin legislation known as the GENIUS Act, to President Trump’s desk. It is expected to be sign into law Friday afternoon and become the first ever piece of major crypto legislation in the U.S.

“This is the biggest deal in crypto so far this year, up there with the change in the SEC – it’s the first crypto-focused law in the history of the United States, home to the largest financial market in the world. Just the symbolism alone is worth getting excited about,” said Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter.

Being law rather than an agency ruling “means that future Administrations will not be able to easily overturn its provisions. Should any try, by then stablecoins will be so deeply embedded in the global financial landscape, it would be futile,” she added.

House lawmakers also passed a second, much broader crypto market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, that will now go to the Senate.

House passes crypto market structure bill

On Thursday, BlackRock also filed with the SEC to include staking to its ETHA ether ETF, which also boosted sentiment for crypto’s second largest coin.

—With reporting by CNBC’s Nick Wells and Adrian van Hauwermeiren

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