Novo Nordisk taps start-up for new oral weight-loss drugs

Fresh off the launch of its semaglutide pill, Novo Nordisk has entered a partnership with a start-up that aims to increase the bioavailability of oral peptides.Vivtex Corporation, launched in 2018 as a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will license oral drug-delivery technologies to Novo for weight loss, diabetes, and related conditions. Novo has agreed to pay Vivtex up to $2.1 billion across upfront and milestone payments. In oral formulations of Wegovy and Rybelsus, its semaglutide pills for weight loss and diabetes, Novo uses salcaprozate sodium, an excipient also known as sodium N-[8-(2-hydroxybenzoyl)amino]caprylate or SNAC for short. SNAC creates a less-acidic pH buffer zone in the gut to minimize protein degradation and help increase peptide absorption. But, Vivtex CEO Thomas von Erlach says, “There is still a little more room to increase the oral bioavailability of these products.”Vivtex began as von Erlach’s postdoctoral project in the lab of MIT professor and prolific start-up founder Bob Langer. In 2018, von Erlach spun it out as a start-up, with himself, Langer, and MIT professor Giovanni Traverso as cofounders. Underpinning Vivtex’s drug-delivery technology is a robotic screening platform that uses gastrointestinal tissue from pigs to predict how different drugs will interact with the human gut (Nat. Biomed. Eng. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41551-023-01128-9). The screening system has informed new—but proprietary—ways of getting drugs to be absorbed in the stomach, von Erlach says.The Novo partnership involves use of the screening system as well as drug-delivery platforms Vivtex has developed. Von Erlach declines to elaborate