With the recent launches of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill and Eli Lilly’s Foundayo, the obesity market has started to shift toward oral GLP-1 drugs. While Novo leverages its first-mover advantage with the familiar Wegovy brand, Lilly is betting the freedom from the strict fasting and water requirements can give Foundayo an edge.
Each week, Fierce Pharma’s Oral GLP-1 Tracker will leverage analysts’ notes and IQVIA data to monitor prescription trends and shifting market shares as these two titans vie to become the go-to oral weight-loss solution for millions.
UPDATE: June 1, 2026
In its seventh week on the market, which ended May 22, Eli Lilly’s obesity pill Foundayo continued to track below the pace of Novo Nordisk’s rival Wegovy pill at the same point in its launch.
At the same time, analysts at Jefferies and Citi again flagged caveats that could be skewing the numbers, with the Jefferies team espousing confidence that Lilly’s oral GLP-1 can still meet consensus sales projections for both the second quarter and 2026 as a whole.
Breaking down the numbers, the Jefferies team put seventh-week total Foundayo prescriptions lower versus the previous week at roughly 11,700, with the clarification that the data’s source, IQVIA, had to use a “best-estimate” tally for the latest week’s prescription trends.
That trend remains “numerically lower” than the course charted by Novo’s Wegovy pill, which racked up an impressive 67,000 prescriptions in its seventh week, although Foundayo’s performance still tracks ahead of Novo’s injectable Wegovy and Lilly’s first obesity incretin med Zepbound at the same point in their respective rollouts, the analyst team said.
Lilly has suggested it expects the market for oral obesity meds to “develop over time” and has also cited the time needed to build new brand awareness for Foundayo, according to Jefferies, which added that the Lilly pill’s commercial reimbursement “appears to be ramping more slowly” compared to oral Wegovy. Lilly has confirmed that coverage of Foundayo through CVS Caremark, the United States’ biggest PBM, will begin this week.
Despite those apparent growing pains, the analysts at Jefferies called Foundayo’s ability to meet consensus sales estimates in the near-term and for the full year as “doable.” The analysts currently predict that Lilly’s oral weight loss med will garner $145 million in the second quarter on the way to a $1.6 billion haul for the full year.
Consensus estimates are tracking for Q2 and full-year Foundayo sales of $136 million and $1.2 billion, respectively, according to Jefferies.
On that note, analysts at Citi, have repeatedly warned that IQVIA’s prescription data may be failing to account for telehealth referrals, citing comments from Lilly executives on the total patients they were tracking as of the company’s Q1 earnings call. For its part, Citi placed the total number of Foundayo scripts for the week ending May 22 at roughly 16,000, based on the IQVIA stats.
By comparison, Novo’s Wegovy pill clocked some 146,000 total scripts over that same seven-day stretch, per Citi. Citi once more flagged that Novo’s Wegovy pill is making up a growing portion of overall semaglutide obesity prescriptions, which the team said points to “preferences for oral formulations.”
UPDATE: May 22, 2026
With both Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s oral GLP-1s establishing their footing in the U.S. obesity market, the companies’ respective Wegovy pill and orforglipron tablet Foundayo are making their mark on prescription trends for a class previously confined primarily to injectables.
Looking at the past four weeks, total U.S. GLP-1 prescriptions were up 3.6%, compared to 1.8% at the same time last year, analysts at Citi wrote in a Friday note to clients, citing script tracking data from IQVIA. The Citi team attributed that momentum to the ability of Novo’s and Lilly’s new oral launches to “broaden and reshape the market” for obesity incretin drugs.
As of the week ended May 15, IQVIA logged nearly 17,000 prescriptions for Lilly’s Foundayo, which debuted on April 9. As in prior weeks, the Citi analysts caveated that IQVIA’s data may be missing key prescribing stats from telehealth channels, flagging Lilly executives’ comments during an earnings call at the end of last month that there were then roughly 20,000 patients on the new oral therapy.
Conversely, Novo’s Wegovy pill has recorded roughly 142,000 prescriptions as of last week, according to Citi’s note.
In an apparent sign of the new oral option's popularity, the analysts flagged that oral Wegovy now comprises 31% of total prescriptions for the brand, which is otherwise administered as an injection. The Citi team noted that this trend could signal “preferences for oral formulations.”
Meanwhile, scoping out the broader U.S. GLP-1 market over the past four weeks, Lilly’s tirzepatide brand—which includes both Zepbound for obesity and Mounjaro for Type 2 diabetes—now holds a 54.8% share compared to a 47% piece of the pie last year. Novo’s U.S. market share for semaglutide has remained “relatively flat” over that stretch and clocked in at 37.4%, per Citi.
Week over week, total GLP-1 prescriptions were down a little less than 1% in the U.S. Looking at obesity specifically, Citi’s analysts flagged a 2.1% tirzepatide prescription decline versus last week, while Novo’s Wegovy prescriptions tracked at a positive 1.8%.
Aside from both companies' oral GLP-1 launches continuing to add texture to the market, the analysts noted that the effect of the Trump administration’s “most favored nation” pricing policies on Novo’s and Lilly’s drugs could boost overall prescriptions for the class.
UPDATE: May 15, 2026
Total prescriptions for Eli Lilly’s Foundayo reached 10,248 for the week that ended May 8, up from 7,335 the prior week, according to IQVIA data cited by Citi. While still on the rise, Foundayo’s growth pace continued to lag behind that of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill during the same stage of their launch.
Wegovy’s total scripts rose by 1.3% week over week to nearly 446,000, as its share in the obesity GLP-1 market climbed 0.1 percentage point to 40.5%, according to Citi.
However, Wegovy’s growth apparently didn’t come from its oral formulation. Wegovy pill scripts landed at about 137,000 for the week, down from roughly 143,000 the prior week, marking the first time that the pill's scripts have fallen since the oral launch in early January.
Scripts from the Wegovy pill made up 31% of total Wegovy scripts for the period, down 2 percentage points from the previous week. Still, Citi analysts argued that this roughly one-third of share “suggests preferences for oral formulations.”
Even as Wegovy gained ground, Lilly’s Zepbound remained the obesity market leader, with 59.5% share, as its nearly 656,000 scripts marked 0.8% growth week over week.
UPDATE: May 8, 2026
As Eli Lilly’s Foundayo finds its footing on the market, Novo Nordisk’s own Wegovy pill—which got a three-month head start to launch over its rival this year—is starting to illuminate just how significant an oral GLP-1 may be to the lucrative obesity drug landscape.
In the fourth week since its April 9 debut in the U.S., Lilly’s Foundayo has generated 7,335 total prescriptions, analysts at Citi wrote in a note to clients Friday, citing prescribing stats from IQVIA.
That ramp-up looks slower on paper than that enjoyed by the Wegovy pill during its initial rollout, but the Citi team cautioned that there may be a gap in IQVIA data linked to telehealth prescriptions for Lilly’s tablet. They pointed to comments from Lilly executives late last week indicating that there were now some 20,000 patients on Foundayo, with the company noting that telehealth platforms were generating some 35% of the oral GLP-1 medicine’s current launch volume.
The analysts acknowledged that Lilly’s early Foundayo prescription trends “continue to build,” while adding that they “look for further growth to develop the oral competitive market.”
During its earnings call last week, Lilly added that upcoming coverage secured at major pharmacy benefit managers should come online by the middle of May, providing a likely sizeable tailwind to Foundayo’s trajectory.
As for Novo, the company logged some 440,410 Wegovy prescriptions on the week that ended May 1, with oral Wegovy now making up 33% of those total obesity referrals, per the Citi analysts, who said that trend could reflect “preferences for oral formulations.”
The update on the oral obesity numbers comes after Novo earlier this week reported that the Wegovy pill generated 2.26 billion Danish kroner (around $355 million) in its first quarter on the U.S. market.
For its part, Foundayo will likely need to start generating around 22,000 prescriptions a week in order to hit current consensus forecasts of $160 million in second-quarter sales, RBC Capital Markets’ Trung Huynh said this week, as cited by Reuters.
UPDATE: May 4, 2026
With three weeks of data on Lilly’s oral GLP-1 launch in obesity now on the books, the dimensions of Foundayo’s rollout—and its critical comparison to that of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill—are coming into focus.
In its third week on the U.S. market, which ended April 24, Foundayo generated some 5,600 prescriptions, analysts at Jefferies wrote in a May 1 note to clients. That level of adoption is numerically lower than the stats recorded by the Wegovy pill in its third week, when prescriptions for the oral obesity med came in at around 26,100, per the note.
Nevertheless, almost all of Foundayo’s recorded performance stems from cash pay channels, according to the Jefferies team, with commercial access via insurance set to come online by the middle of this month, which will likely give Foundayo a substantial boost in uptake.
The team acknowledged that Foundayo’s reimbursement “appears to be ramping more slowly vs oral Wegovy’s.”
Overall, the analysts described Foundayo as “off to a solid start,” and estimate the drug will generate $146 million in the second quarter and $1.6 billion for all of 2026. That compares to consensus forecasts of $134 million and $1.2 billion, respectively.
Lilly told the Jefferies team that, as of week three of its launch, some 45% of Foundayo prescriptions were coming through its direct-to-patient channel LillyDirect, alongside 35% of referrals from telehealth providers and the remaining 20% coming from traditional retail venues.
During an earnings call with analysts last week, Lilly executives noted that there were around 20,000 patients on Foundayo in the U.S. The drug was approved April 1.
As for Novo’s pill, oral Wegovy lassoed around 135,000 total prescriptions during the week that ended April 24, according to the Jefferies notes.
UPDATE: April 24, 2026
Eli Lilly’s oral GLP-1 obesity treatment Foundayo has attracted 3,707 prescriptions though its second week on the market, lagging far behind the pace of Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 pill Wegovy, which drew 18,410 prescriptions though its second week on the market in January.
The results were made available by Jefferies from healthcare analytics firm IQVIA and are good through the week ending on April 17.
With the result, Lilly’s shares dipped by 4% on Friday, compared to a 7% gain for Novo.
Foundayo’s launch so far does compare favorably to that of Novo’s injected Wegovy, which numbered 1,578 prescriptions through two weeks when it reached the market in the U.S. but falls short of Lilly’s Zepbound pen, which counted 7,292 prescriptions through its second week.
In its note to investors, analysts from Jefferies called the result “disappointing vs. expectations."
Brand recognition has played a role, according to Bernstein analyst Courtney Breen, who said that online searches for GLP-1 drugs peaked during Wegovy’s launch, potentially boosting demand.
UPDATE: April 21, 2026
Eli Lilly’s oral GLP-1 Foundayo is off to a solid launch, drawing 1,390 prescriptions in its first week on the market, according to tracking figures from IQVIA and presented by Jefferies. The tabulation is from the week starting April 6. This compares to the 3,071 prescriptions Novo Nordisk garnered during its Wegovy pill launch week in January.
While Foundayo came up short in this oral GLP-1 launch week comparison, it did exceed the number of prescriptions recorded in the first week of the launch of both Lilly’s injected Zepbound (1,100) and Novo’s injected version of Wegovy (768).
In a note to clients, analysts with Jefferies cautioned that comparisons can be “tricky” given that oral Wegovy was launched at the start of the year and that initial capture rates from IQVIA are “volatile” and may not include product sampling.
“Overall, we think Foundayo’s initial scripts look excellent,” the Jefferies team wrote, adding that it is modeling Foundayo’s sales to reach $1.6 billion this year, compared to a consensus of $1.5 billion, with its peak annual sales topping out at $30 billion versus the consensus of $26 billion.
“We think the real opportunity for Foundayo is ex-U.S., given its clear advantages on scale, distribution and [cost of goods sold],” Jefferies wrote.