Novo Nordisk stock plummets 12.4% after weight-loss pill Ozempic fails Alzheimer's trials — All you need to know

Shares of Danish pharma major Novo Nordisk's plummeted a record 12.4% on 24 November — it's lowest since July 2021, after the company's popular weight-loss pill Ozempic failed trials for Alzheimer's treatment, Bloomberg reported.

Novo Nordisk has discontinued its planned one-year extension for the pair of studies that were testing the drug's effectiveness in slowing the progression of Alzheimer's disease, it added.

The two trials, with 3,500 participants with mild Alzheimer’s disease, had a 75% probability of failing, Morgan Stanley analysts estimated before the results.

Jared Holz, a health strategist at Mizuho, wrote in a note that the stock tanked as Novo could not even give a silver lining for the trails, “There was talk that the trial could fail in totality but still illustrate differentiation in certain patient populations.”

The news is a big hit for Novo, which had pinned hopes of a revival on new CEO Mike Doustdar, and the “long-shot” effort to treat Alzheimer's disease. The firm has lost its top spot in the obesity and weight-loss market to United States-based Eli Lilly and has since failed to regain the position, the report added.

Meanwhile, rival Eli Lilly's stock also declined in trading before US exchanges opened; while Biogen Inc., which has been developing different Alzheimer’s drugs, was up 6.7%.

Ozempic fails treatment trials for Alzheimer's disease

According to the report, the company on 24 November said that the cognitive assessment of patients in the Ozempic study showed that they did not see their progression of Alzheimer's slow down.

Speaking to Bloomberg on expectations despite the acknowledgement of failure, Per Hansen, investment economist at Nordnet AB described the trials as a “lottery ticket”, while Evan Seigermann, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said even with a slim chance of success, the possibility was “transformative”.

“It was a lottery ticket that could have had great value. Investors hadn’t assigned it any real value. Still, the hope was there,” Hansen said.

While Seigermann stated, “Being able to slow the memory-robbing disease at all could have been transformative.”

Ozempic, which mimics the gut hormone GLP-1 and already has proven itself in a range of health problems linked to obesity, including heart attack and stroke prevention and liver disease. Analysts told Bloomberg, that while it may not treat Alzheimer's, the drug may have had a better chance at preventing it.

“This is a recurring theme in Alzheimer’s disease therapeutics. When pathology is advanced, preventing further biochemical decline is not necessarily enough to restore complex neural networks that have already deteriorated,” Ivan Koychev, an associate professor in neuropsychiatry at Imperial College London told the publication.

However, the market remains a lucrative one for drugmakers. Drug development for Alzheimer’s disease, which causes severe cognitive decline, memory loss and personality change, has been “notoriously” hard, but the potential is significant.

Success in developing a treatment could have brought Novo as much as $5 billion in extra annual revenue, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

Novo Nordisk faces tough competition from Eli Lilly

Novo is facing tough competition from Lilly, whose rival drugs have overtaken the obesity market leader position. In 2025, the Danish drugmaker's value has more than halved as investor are concerned over its long-term competitiveness, it said.

CEO Doustdar, took the post in August and cut 11% of the workforce and shifted focus on what he called infusing Novo with “performance culture.”

There was great hope that evidence of semaglutide (main ingredient in Novo’s Wegovy and Ozempic) having an impact on dementia could have given it a competitive advantage against Eli Lilly’s Zepbound.

In a statement announcing the results, Novo's Chief Scientific Officer Martin Holst Lange said, “We felt we had a responsibility to explore semaglutide’s potential. The treatment resulted in improvement of some physiological measures linked to Alzheimer’s, though that didn’t translate into slower worsening of the disease.”

(With inputs from Bloomberg)