An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injector pen placed in the Brooklyn neighborhood of New York on March 28, 2024.
Shelby Knowles | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Elie Lilly on Monday launched a new form of its blockbuster obesity drug, Zepbound, that offers one-month doses in a single pen.
Patients who pay cash can get the multidose device, called KwikPen, through the company’s direct-to-consumer website, LillyDirect. Prices start at $299 per month for the lowest dose level.
The pen could be a more convenient option for some patients because it reduces the number of devices they have to use over the course of a month to take the medication. Patients can use one pen to take four weekly doses of Zepbound.
Currently, patients on treatment use a different single-dose auto-injector each week. Lilly also offers single-dose vials of Zepbound, in which users must draw the medication into a syringe and inject themselves.
The announcement comes as Lilly works to maintain the early success of Zepbound, whose demand has exploded since entering the market in late 2023. LillyDirect has played a key role in Zepbound’s growth, and rolling out a new form of the drug to the platform could attract even more patients.
Zepbound’s meteoric growth helped Eli Lilly capture a majority share of the weight-loss drug market from rival Novo Nordisk. In the company’s fourth quarter, Zepbound generated $4.2 billion in revenue in the United States, an increase of 122% from the previous year.
In a statement, Lilly said the Food and Drug Administration approved a label expansion for Zepbound to include the multidose device.
The KwikPen is already used for other medications, such as Lilly’s popular diabetes drug Mounjaro.
“As part of our commitment to supporting obese people on their weight management journey, we are introducing a new option with the Zepbound KwikPen, a device that patients around the world and in the United States trust with other Lilly medicines,” Ilya Yuffa, president of Lilly USA and Global Customer Capabilities, said in the release.