Maziar Mike Doust­dar will lead his first No­vo Nordisk earn­ings call next week. He’ll have many keen ob­servers.

In his three short months atop No­vo, the Dan­ish drug gi­ant has un­der­gone a vast re­vamp.

The com­pa­ny is lay­ing off 9,000 em­ploy­ees, about 11% of its to­tal work­force. More than half of its board, in­clud­ing the chair, sur­pris­ing­ly de­part­ed and ced­ed con­trol back to for­mer No­vo CEO Lars Re­bi­en Sørensen. The phar­ma com­pa­ny axed its cell ther­a­py R&D. And it inked two ac­qui­si­tions, in­clud­ing one that al­most fell apart.

The changes were a re­sponse to No­vo’s poor per­for­mance since it suf­fered a ma­jor clin­i­cal dis­ap­point­ment in De­cem­ber last year. Its Copen­hagen-list­ed stock has lost more than half its val­ue since then, its sales of GLP-1 drugs hav­ing been hit hard by com­pounders and com­pe­ti­tion from Eli Lil­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US.

Con­sumers are hav­ing an en­tire­ly dif­fer­ent re­la­tion­ship with how they ac­cess weight loss drugs, buy­ing them even if there isn’t in­sur­ance cov­er­age. And it's push­ing drug­mak­ers to act dif­fer­ent­ly.

“It's not a nor­mal thing for us on the man­u­fac­tur­er side,” Dave Moore, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of US op­er­a­tions at No­vo Nordisk, told End­points News on the side­lines of the an­nu­al HLTH con­fer­ence. “But what we're learn­ing is, obe­si­ty is dif­fer­ent, and there is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to po­ten­tial­ly en­gage and di­rect­ly es­tab­lish a re­la­tion­ship.”

To set up that re­la­tion­ship, No­vo launched Novo­Care Phar­ma­cy in March. Pa­tients pay­ing cash for No­vo’s We­govy and Ozem­pic can ac­cess the drugs for $499 a month. Moore said that at the be­gin­ning of the year, a sin­gle-dig­it per­cent­age of new GLP-1 pre­scrip­tions were self-pay. That’s grown to dou­ble dig­its in the short time since Novo­Care launched.

Kyver­na Ther­a­peu­tics re­port­ed pos­i­tive rare dis­ease da­ta on Wednes­day morn­ing, say­ing that a small co­hort of gen­er­al­ized myas­the­nia gravis (gMG) pa­tients all re­spond­ed to its cell ther­a­py treat­ment.

In the Phase 2 por­tion of a Phase 2/3 study, Kyver­na’s KYV-101 in­duced re­spons­es in all six pa­tients, who saw an av­er­age re­duc­tion in a symp­tom mea­sure­ment score of 8.0 points af­ter 24 weeks. The co­hort was open-la­bel, so there was no com­para­tor arm. All six pa­tients had pre­vi­ous­ly seen their dis­ease progress on oth­er treat­ments, such as com­ple­ment and FcRn in­hibitors.

With the da­ta, Kyver­na plans to move in­to the Phase 3 part of the tri­al and en­roll about 60 pa­tients, CEO Warn­er Bid­dle told End­points News in an in­ter­view. Re­searchers will com­pare KYV-101 to the stan­dard of care, which is a reg­i­men of im­muno­sup­pres­sants and steroids.