Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Eli Lilly, the world’s largest drugmaker by market value, has struck a deal that will allow Amazon’s online pharmacy business to dispense medication, including its hugely popular weight loss injection pen.
The addition of Amazon Pharmacy to Eli Lilly’s direct-to-consumer dispensing network is the first time Amazon has partnered with a big drug company since it launched its online pharmacy business in 2020.
LillyDirect, which was launched in January, offers patients access to third-party telehealth consultations where they can receive prescriptions such as Eli Lilly’s Zepbound anti-obesity medication and then have the drugs delivered to their homes.
The push into prescriptions and drug delivery is unusual for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, pitting Eli Lilly against pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens. The company said the decision was partly driven by huge demand for weight-loss drugs.
There are 14 medications available so far via LillyDirect including Zepbound — which generated $175.8mn of sales in the last few weeks of 2023 after receiving regulatory approval in November — various diabetes medicines and a migraine treatment. The number of users of LillyDirect is not disclosed.
On a fourth-quarter earnings call last month, Patrik Jonsson, who runs the drugmaker’s diabetes and obesity business, said it intended to make more medicines available on the platform in future.
LillyDirect also uses online pharmacy TruePill to dispense its medicines. A partnership with a major drugmaker is a boon for Amazon Pharmacy, which launched four years ago promising to offer discounts on branded and generic medicines but has struggled to use strategies that worked well for general retail to gain a foothold in medical sales.
“Healthcare in the US is extremely complicated with a lot of entrenched interests so Lilly partnering with Amazon is something of a breakthrough,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.
“Big Pharma endorsing Amazon as a distribution partner bolsters Amazon’s role in healthcare and could be the start of many more of these arrangements.”
Jonsson said last month that the drugmaker did not consider LillyDirect “a way to create some new retail distribution business” but instead was meant to give patients more certainty about the supply and quality of their medication.
“There’s been a lot of noise about drugs that are illicit or copies or compounded versions of Zepbound or other weight loss drugs and that’s concerning to us and I think it’s concerning to patients, so by going to LillyDirect, they have confidence in the supply,” he said.
Read the full article here