SHANGHAI \u2014 China will add a second GLP-1 drug, used to treat \u200bdiabetes, to a list of essential drugs all public hospitals are required to prioritize having in their formulary, a government statement said \u200con Thursday.<\/p>\n
China, the world’s second-biggest pharmaceutical market, has the highest number of adults with diabetes in \u2060the world, according to estimates \u200bfrom the International Diabetes Federation.<\/p>\n
Justin Wang, \u2060a partner at global strategy consultancy L.E.K. Consulting in Shanghai, told Reuters \u200cthe essential listing \u200cwould mean the drug, semaglutide, should be available even in remote \u2060rural hospitals.<\/p>\n
So far only the Ozempic brand \u2060version has approval, but Wang said the inclusion of semaglutide in the National Essential Drug List would also “pave the way for generics to be broadly listed” once they are approved in China.<\/p>\n
“We can expect semaglutide and other newly added NEDL drugs to become much more \u200caccessible across the country,” he said, adding that \u200bit was the second GLP-1 to be listed after liraglutide, an older medication.<\/p>\n
The injectable semaglutide will be included on China’s national essential drug list, effective from September 1, under the insulin and blood glucose-lowering medication category, Thursday’s government statement said.<\/p>\n
It did not mention obesity, which can also be treated by some GLP-1 drugs.<\/p>\n
Sales of Ozempic GLP-1 injector \u200bpens in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong \u2013 Novo Nordisk’s largest market after \u200cthe U.S. \u2013 slipped \u200c7% to \u2060about $853 million in 2025.<\/p>\n
Novo Nordisk did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it expected a significant increase in revenue for that drug in China due to the listing.<\/p>\n
The patent \u200con the active ingredient \u200bsemaglutide expired in China in March, though \u200cthe company has regulatory \u2060data protection until \u200bearly next year.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHANGHAI \u2014 China will add a second GLP-1 drug, used to treat \u200bdiabetes, to a list of essential…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[84,7816,18057,4176,102,5365,718,1371,8929,6591,50,2186,18058,101,3133,13803,56,54,55,2253,1068],"class_list":["post-684658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-business","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-health","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-medication","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}