Digital health company Noom to offer compounded GLP-1 drug through new weight loss program

Published

9 months ago

September 12, 2024

admin

Digital health company Noom on Thursday announced it will offer a compounded GLP-1 drug as part of a new weight loss product that starts at $149.

The treatment will feature compounded semaglutide, the same active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster obesity and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic. Noom has offered weight loss programs for years, and consumers can already try to access those branded medications through its platform.

But Noom is the latest in a string of digital health companies to offer compounded versions of the medications as a cheaper alternative for consumers while demand for weight loss and diabetes drugs spikes. Hims & Hers and Sesame have launched similar programs in recent months — and the market for low-cost options has grown more competitive.

“Our position is that more supply, especially at a reasonable price, is needed right now, not less,” Noom CEO Geoff Cook told CNBC in an interview.

Wegovy and Ozempic belong to a highly popular class of medications called GLP-1s, which mimic certain gut hormones to tamp down a patient’s appetite and regulate their blood sugar. The compounded versions are custom-made alternatives to the brand drugs, and they can be produced when brand-name treatments are in shortage.

Compounded GLP-1 medications are typically much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Wegovy and Ozempic both cost roughly $1,000 per month before insurance. Most insurance plans cover GLP-1s when they are used to treat diabetes, but coverage of the weight loss drugs is less widespread. Spiking demand can also make it difficult for many patients to find the branded treatments.

Cook said consumers will pay $149 for their first month in Noom’s program and $279 for the following months as the dose of their medication increases.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not review the safety and efficacy of compounded products, and the agency has urged consumers to take the approved, branded GLP-1 medications when they are available. However, the FDA does inspect some outsourcing facilities that compound drugs, according to its website.

Noom said it is working with an FDA-regulated 503B compounding pharmacy to provide its medication for its new program, which is called Noom GLP-1 RX.

“The drug manufacturer we’re working with generates 20 generic medications, epinephrine being one of them — a lifesaving medication that’s available in hospitals all across the United States,” Dr. Adonis Saremi, chief medical officer of Noom, told CNBC in an interview. “So we’re really confident and happy with our vetting process.”

The company said it has also introduced a way for participants to taper off the compounded treatment if they would like to stop taking it. GLP-1s are intended for long-term use, which means some patients may end up taking them indefinitely.

Cook said Noom has seen both anecdotal and real-world evidence that patients are able to maintain weight loss after they stop taking the drugs. Six out of seven patients are off GLP-1s by the two-year mark anyway, he said.

“It’s prescribed by the doctor, the person takes their medicine, they lose weight, but then life happens,” Cook said. “They eventually stop taking the medication, or their insurance stops covering it, they’ll change a job [so] it’s no longer covered.”

Cook said not everyone will be able to taper off the medication, so some people will likely end up taking it indefinitely. The company will provide a free year of Noom or “substantial medication discounts” to anyone who regains the weight within 18 months after following its program for a year, it said in a release.

Consumers can get started with the Noom GLP-1 RX program by filling out an intake form on the website. Noom said one of its contracted, obesity-trained doctors will review the intake form and decide if the compounded medication is appropriate for that patient. If so, the drugs will arrive at their door within a week, Noom said.

Participants will learn how to inject their medication, and they can use a chat feature to talk one-on-one with a coach and their Noom clinician, the company said. They’ll also have access to a range of psychology-based programming and tools to help keep them from losing muscle mass, such as features for tracking protein intake and engaging in resistance training, Noom said.

And if users decide they are ready to move off the medication, they can chat with their clinician or tap “initiate taper” in their settings, Noom said.

“I think there’s a lot of folks who don’t want to be on a medication for the rest of their lives, and in any event, people aren’t doing that in the real world,” Cook said. “Our goal is just not to sell more medications. It’s to drive sustained weight loss outcomes.”

Technology

OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract

Published

4 hours ago

June 16, 2025

admin

OpenAI wins 0 million U.S. defense contract

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”

“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.

Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.

The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.

In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.

WATCH: OpenAI hits $10 billion in annual recurring revenue

Technology

Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

Published

7 hours ago

June 16, 2025

admin

Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

AWS CEO: Lots of opportunity to expand infrastructure globally

Technology

Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Published

8 hours ago

June 16, 2025

admin

Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom