Novo Nordisk: Krogh's Insulin Lab, Wegovy and a Value Bigger Than Denmark

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In 1923, Danish Nobel laureate August Krogh and his wife Marie, on a U.S. lecture tour, went to Toronto to meet insulin's discoverers Frederick Banting, John Macleod, Charles Best and James Collip, and won permission to produce insulin in Denmark. With Hans Christian Hagedorn and backer August Kongsted, Krogh formed the Nordisk Insulin Laboratory in 1924 under a non-profit structure. In 1925 brothers Harald and Thorvald Pedersen left to found the rival Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium, and the two companies competed until merging in 1989. Today Novo Holdings, owned by a charitable foundation, controls the voting shares. Semaglutide, sold as Ozempic and Rybelsus for diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity, made weight-loss drugs 55 percent of revenue, and in 2024 Novo's $604 billion market value exceeded Denmark's GDP.

To scale up, Novo Holdings bought Catalent for $16.5 billion, Novo took three of its sites for $11 billion, and it spent $4.1 billion on a North Carolina plant. A $1.3 billion hypertension drug bought from KBP Biosciences failed, and Novo sued in Singapore for up to $830 million, alleging hidden trial data. The UK's ABPI suspended Novo for two years in 2023 over marketing practices, and by 2025 Judge Karen Marston had consolidated more than 2,600 suits against Novo and Eli Lilly over gastroparesis and other harms. A Senate committee found Ozempic at about $969 a month in the U.S. versus $59 in Germany. In 2025 a Trump administration deal set $245 injectables and $149 pills for Medicare, Medicaid and TrumpRx, Novo cut 9,000 jobs, and Mike Doustdar became CEO.

• Novo's logo shows the Egyptian bull deity Apis with a sun disc between its horns.
• Corporate Knights named Novo the most sustainable company in the world in 2012.
• In 2022, two thirds of Denmark's economic growth came from the pharmaceutical industry.
• A late-2025 trial found semaglutide had no significant effect on Alzheimer's-related cognitive decline.
• Novo launched the NovoCare pharmacy selling Wegovy for $499 a month and, in 2026, sued Eli Lilly for false advertising.