India Enters The Glp 1 Race Daily Brief 449

TITLE: India enters the GLP-1 race | The Daily Brief #449 CHANNEL: Markets by Zerodha DATE: 2026-04-21 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvXBwUC6l6o ---TRANSCRIPT--- In today’s episode, we’ll break down two important stories. First, we’ll talk about the rough tides of the GLP1 market and then we’ll talk about how stronger pays impact Indian exporters. Welcome back to the daily brief by Zeroda where we cut through the noise to help you understand what’s actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I’m your host Axara and today is Tuesday 21st April.

Coming to the first story. So at markets we’ve spoken about the ticking time bomb of the semiglutide patent expiring plenty of times in the past year. Now that the bomb has gone off, so has the potentiality of a war, a price war. A few weeks ago, Novo Nordisk cut the price of its blockbuster drugs in India by up to 48%. Ompic which had been selling for between Rs 8,800 and Rs 11,175 a month suddenly costs a fraction of that. Some versions of the same molecule are now available in India for rupes 1,290 a month. A 90% price collapse in a matter of weeks. But NOA Nordisk didn’t decide to be generous. They were forced to. Its key Indian patent on semaglutide the molecule behind osmpic and wiggovi expired on March 20th and Indian pharma firms who had been counting down to this date for years flooded the market. Dr. Daddy’s launched on day one followed by mankind zidusnatco and glenmark India has followed this playbook for varieties of medicines from cancer drugs to antibiotics. Wait for a patent to expire make the molecule cheaper sell it to the world. It’s how we became the pharmacy of the world and today India supplies approximately 40% of US generic drug volume. So does this mean India has disrupted the GLP-1 market? Have we successfully made the world’s hottest drug which single-handedly minted billions for its makers a cheap generic? That story is a little more complicated than just saying yes we did.

So let’s start with why semaglutide has always been hard to copy. The GLP-1 hormone that semoglutide mimics is something your body already makes naturally. Every time you finish a meal, your gut releases a burst of GLP-1, a tiny molecular signal that tells your brain you’re full and your pancreas to release insulin. Scientists identified it in the 1980s and immediately saw the therapeutic potential. The problem was brutal and simple. Natural GLP-1 breaks down in your bloodstream in about 2 minutes. A drug that vanishes in 2 minutes is not a drug. So, Novo Nordisk’s chemists solved this with two modifications to the natural molecule. First, they swapped one amino acid in the chain for a synthetic variant that the body’s enzymes struggle to break apart, reinforcing the molecule’s most vulnerable point. Second, they attached a long fatty acid tail to a specific location and this causes the molecule to latch onto a protein called albamin that floats abundantly in human blood. So, abdomen is large, stable and the body’s filtering systems leave it alone. So semiglutide hijing a ride on ibupin survives for roughly a week. Now those two modifications turned a hormone that lasts 2 minutes into a drug worth $40 billion a year. They also turned what might have been a straightforward generic target into something with nearly 600 atoms that all have to be in exactly the right place. After all, if you change one amino acid, the molecule might not bind to its receptor at all. If you alter the fatty acid tail, the aban camouflage breaks and the drug disappears in ours. Even the slightest of errors in three-dimensional geometry, something that might look fine in a basic chemical analysis, and you end up with something that looks like semiglutide on paper, but behaves completely differently in a human body. In contrast, aspirin just has 21 atoms, which makes it far easier to copy. Now making a generic version of semlutide is something else entirely. Even if you theoretically copied the design, how would you ensure that every unit of that design is manufactured perfectly? The process for making semaglutide is called solid phase peptide synthesis. You build the molecules amino acid chain one unit at a time, coupling each new unit to the growing chain through a sequence of chemical reactions. Each reaction requires specific toxic solvents at every step and these solvents have no easy substitutes. The waste generated in making 1 kilg of semiglutad api weighs up to 14,000 kg. A standard small molecule generic in contrast generates about 300 kg per kilogram of drug. Now each coupling step has a small failure rate. Even at 99% efficacy per step across 31 steps, and that’s a tall ask, only about 73% of the chains you’re building come out correctly in theory, that’s an incredulously high accuracy benchmark to meet. Additionally, in practice, state-of-the-art synthesis achieves around 57% purity. And that implies that nearly half of what you make is impure in some way and has to be separated out through rounds of expensive purification. Plus the infrastructure for all of this, the synthesis reactors, the high pressure purification systems, the sterile fill finish lines is not what India’s generics industry was built on.

Now despite all that complexity, Indian companies did build the capability. So Dr. Ready spent years developing peptide synthesis capacity from scratch. API manufacturing, sterile formulation and a proprietary injectable pen device, all in-house at its Visag facility. It launched its own offering Obida on day one. Zidus became a manufacturing partner for Lupin and Torrent. Mankind launched with its reach into smaller cities and towns. No one wanted to miss the first day of the impending gold rush. But then came Canada. Canada is one of the first major western markets where summer glutide patents had already lapsed. So when Dr. Ready’s filed to sell its generic there, Health Canada asked both Dr. Reddies and Sandos to provide additional data before their applications could proceed. They couldn’t and now their launch is pushed down the line. Now, this isn’t business as usual. It doesn’t happen with standard genetics. For a small molecule drug, proving bioequivalence that your version delivers the same drug at the same rate into the bloodstream is a well-worn regulatory path. But peptide drugs like semaglutide are different. Health Canada describes these as complex synthetic products with possible differences that could impact safety and efficacy. Meaning regulators need to scrutinize not just whether the molecule is present, but whether subtle differences in how it was made, its impurity profile or its three-dimensional structure could make it behave differently in patients. Indian and Canadian approvals clearly have different regulatory bars.

So India, Canada, Brazil, China, Turkey, these are the markets where some glutide is going generic in 2026. Together they represent a huge share of the world’s population and an enormous burden of diabetes and obesity. And these markets are indeed already subject to deflation in the price of the drug. In February, Novo Nordisk warned analysts its revenues could fall by 5 to 13% this year because of these expirations. But here’s what Nova Nordisk’s revenue actually looks like. India’s GLP-1 market was worth approximately rupes 110 million in 2024. Novo Nordisk’s global GLP1 revenues last year were over $40 billion almost entirely from the US and Europe where patients or their insurers pay $700 to $1,000 a month and have no cheaper option. The Indian market is roughly.3% of global GLP1 revenues. Now the US patent doesn’t expire until 2032 lending Novo Nordisk six more years of exclusivity in the market that drives the vast majority of their semaglutide revenues. What’s more while Indian companies were spending years building the capability to manufacture semiglutide something was already happening in the market they were building toward see American pharma firm Eli Liyle makes Mount Gerro which is based on a molecule called tzapatide. It does what semlutide does, but while semaglutide targets one hormone receptor, tzepide targets two simultaneously. In a head-to-head trial in late 2024, tzepide beat some glutide on weight loss outcomes. And by October 2025, 5 months before the Indian semaglutide patent even expired, Mounterro had already overtaken Wiggov as India stopped selling GLP1 by value. Lily has approximately a decade of patent protection on tears appetite remaining. In essence, while generics approach the bottom, the innovators seem to have moved to the next floor and the pipeline keeps moving. Novo Nordisk is advancing a next generation molecule that combines semaglutide with a second hormone and produces substantially greater weight loss in early trials. Both Novo and Lily have oral GLP-1 pills, daily tablets instead of weekly injections in late stage development. If oral versions achieve comparable efficiency to injectables, the competitive picture changes again. Each new drug carries its own decade of patent protection.

So on March 20th, 135 million Indians with diabetes were now able to access a drug that perhaps most couldn’t afford at branded prices. One study published last month estimated that semaglutide could theoretically be manufactured for as little as $28 per patient per year as competition scales up. In comparison, in the US, patients still pay an annual cost of over $10,000, which is approximately rupes 9.3 lakh. But the framing of India breaking the GLP1 monopoly is a little more complicated. There are still question marks over how big the addressable market for generics really is. Indian pharma firms are struggling to get over Canada’s rules. The US and European markets don’t open until 2032. and the drug at the center of all this had already lost its crown in India’s own market before the patent war was even over. How this race to the bottom unfolds is really anyone’s guess.

[Second story on the 2002 Patents Amendment Act and Indian exporters follows — see full transcript above. Also includes tidbits on Razorpay IPO filing, state government securities borrowing, and muted Akshaya Tritiya gold demand.]