The Danish drugmaker is collaborating with Vivtex, cofounded by billionaire Robert Langer, to quickly iterate oral versions of successors to Ozempic and Wegovy.
Feb 25, 2026, 08:00am ESTzempic has been a household name for less than half a decadeto reach $150 billion globally by 2030. Between 15-18 million Americans are expected to be taking one by the end of the year, and up to 40 million by the end of the decade, according to analyst firm Jefferies.
The GLP-1 market is still dominated by Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk and Indiana-based Eli Lilly, which makes competitor drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound. Last month, Novo put a pill version of its obesity drug Wegovy on the market, which already has nearly 250,000 prescriptions in just five weeks. Lilly has its own oral obesity drug on the way, expected to be approved by the FDA in the second quarter. As the race for this segment continues, Novo Nordisk announced Wednesday that it has entered into an agreement with Boston biotech startup Vivtex, which helps companies make oral versions of injectable drugs, to help it develop next-generation pills for obesity and diabetes. The deal is worth up to $2.1 billion in upfront and milestone payments, plus royalties for any commercialized medicines developed., adding that it’s gratifying to “take the discoveries we make and get them out to patients.” The stakes are high for Denmark-based Novo Nordisk. Although it pioneered the GLP-1 space, Wall Street expects it to lose its market lead to Lilly by the end of the year. Its stock is down more than 24% this year, most recently falling by double digits after aof its newest obesity drug, CagriSema, found it underperformed rival Lilly’s Zepbound. It also lost a high-profile bidding war for obesity biotech startup Metsera to Pfizer. Novo still has the lead in pill versions of obesity drugs. These are expected to capture a large segment of the patient population, both because they don’t involve needles and because their production costs are lower. The pill version of Wegovy showsthan Lilly’s rival version, Orforglipron, which is still several months away from hitting the market. Seeking out next generation oral GLP-1s could help the company maintain its competitive edge. That’s in part because clinical trials of both Lilly’s and Novo’s drugs found higher levels of side effects than their injectable counterparts, which will likely lead patients to shop around as more alternatives become available. That’s where Vivtex comes in. Cofounded in 2018 by Langer and fellow MIT scientists Giovanni Traverso and Thomas von Erlach, the startup works with customers like Orbis Medicines and Astellas Pharma to develop pill versions of “biologics”—large, complex medicines like GLP-1s that are usually given to patients with an IV or injection. It’s difficult to make pill versions of these drugs, Traverso said, because they “are just like the things we eat,” so the body is primed by evolution to degrade them. That means when a drug is delivered to the body, only a tiny fraction ends up being absorbed, often too small to have a therapeutic effect.To improve this, Vivtex has developed a "gastrointestinal system on a chip”–small pieces of pig GI tissue that can be subjected to an automated lab setup. This enables Vivtex to conduct thousands of experiments a day, Langer said, which can be analyzed by machine learning to help scientists find ideal chemical formulations for pill versions of drugs. The company’s AI systems, Langer said, can use the results of those experiments to help predict even better-performing formulations, enabling the company’s scientists to quickly iterate to better-performing drugs. “On certain molecules we have been able to increase the absorption by a factor of over a hundred,” he said. The process is “so much faster that it would almost never happen otherwise,” he added. By partnering with Vivtex, Novo Nordisk aims to use the company’s platform to quickly move new versions of obesity drugs out of the injectable category and into pills. The more Vivtex improves those drugs’ absorption, the less expensive they will be to manufacture, meaning Novo will be able to compete on both price and features, potentially keeping its lead in the market.
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