By Diana Novak Jones
-A federal judge in Texas has upheld the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to remove Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy from the shortage list, rejecting a challenge brought by compounding pharmacies who sought to continue making copies of the drugs.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, said that the FDA had appropriately weighed supply and demand data for the drugs and properly removed them from the shortage list.
Pittman had denied the pharmacies’ bid for an injunction in April, blocking them from making copies of the drugs while the litigation was pending.
The ruling is a blow to compounding pharmacies that had been allowed to produce hundreds of thousands of doses of copies of obesity drugs while the FDA said there was a shortage of them and could dash patients’ hopes of regaining access to cheaper copies of the popular therapies.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Mark Porter)
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