(Wired) – Now that Novo Nordisk is the world’s weight-loss juggernaut, will it have to betray its first patients—type 1 diabetics?

Though Novo has as its controlling shareholder the largest altruistic foundation in the world, it has to act coldly and tactically, like an oil or defense company. The demanding semaglutide business has become a mean ouroboros: the insatiable market, exorbitant manufacturing costs, competition from Eli Lilly, pricing pressure from governments, and the private-insurance dystopia in the US—by far Novo’s biggest market, where some 15 million people now take semaglutide. At the same time is the moral crux. Semaglutide alone almost never works for the 8.4 million type 1 diabetics around the world. What keeps Jørgensen up at night is his fear that, the way drug manufacturing and American health care companies and global markets work, his company might not be able to do right by its original patients. These are the non-Hollywood patients—the ones who, like Eric Hageman, can’t live without insulin. (Read More)