In the last week of December, while most of the U.S. was still in holiday mode, Novo Nordisk’s plant in North Carolina was operating at full capacity.
On Dec. 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the company’s oral version of Wegovy, making it the first pill of the popular GLP-1 medications to get the green light for weight loss. People who want to lose weight and are prescribed Wegovy now have the option of taking the tablet daily, versus injecting themselves with the drug once a week. They’ll lose about the same amount of weight with either version: between 16% and 17% of their starting body weight.
The plant, just outside of Raleigh, is operating around the clock to produce bottles of pills in four different doses. The bottles are bound for retail stores and online pharmacies and will be available starting on Jan. 5. “Obesity has become a consumer-oriented disease,” said Novo Nordisk’s CEO Mike Doustdar in an interview with TIME. “We’re embracing that.”
The company’s entire supply of the drug, from start to finish, will be manufactured in North Carolina. Days before the launch of Wegovy pill, TIME visited the plant to watch how the first Wegovy pills are being produced, bottled, and packaged for patients.
It all starts with yeast
Wegovy pill begins with a fungus: specifically, the same yeast used to make bread, called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. But instead of fermenting sugars or grains to make bread rise, the yeast cells are genetically engineered at Novo Nordisk’s facility in Clayton, North Carolina to produce a protein that undergoes fermentation in several four-story tall tanks, then multiple purification steps over about a month to produce semaglutide, a compound that mimics a human hormone that regulates appetite by working in the reward center of…
