alt Hacker News> By chance I just talked to someone with deeper knowledge on this and they said the current constraint is actually ramping up supply of the delivery mechanism, not the drug.
The article says this:
> Surprisingly, the study found that the biggest cost in producing Ozempic is not the active medicine, called semaglutide, but the disposable pens used to inject it. They can be made for no more than $2.83 per month’s supply, the authors concluded, based on interviews with former employees and consultants to injection device manufacturers. One Ozempic pen is used weekly and lasts a month.
So while the injection pens are significantly more expensive than manufacturing the drug itself, they are still relatively cheap. So it seems to be not a major problem to strongly ramp up production here as well.
Which suggests any supply shortage will be resolved relatively quickly. Perhaps in less than a year? Then the limiting factor will not be the supply but the market price.
There are also doctors that are prescribing vials of semaglutide and commodity needles, and training patients to properly dose up and administer the drug via a standard needle. There's more to it than the auto-injector pens, but not that much more to it. And it does bring costs down, which is important to some. Alternatively, you can just go to the doctor's office weekly and have a nurse there do a traditional injection for you (doesn't help as much with costs, but does bypass the auto-injector shortage).