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Your family is watching the Superbowl. Serena Williams, one of the best athletes of all time, appears in an ad where she injects herself with “Ro”, a peptide that has helped her lose “31 pounds”. Not only is her husband Alexis Ohanian the cofounder of Reddit, a huge platform for promoting self administering peptides, he also sits on Ro’s board. 

Somewhere along the way, “peptides” stopped sounding like medicine and became consumer goods. If you go to the peptide Reddit, you will find a popular community of peptide users encouraging biohacking by taking peptides in “stacks”. “Stacking” involves taking multiple peptides to target different biological functions. More ways to suppress appetite, get better skin, bigger muscles. More outcomes, more risk. 

The original peptide Ozempic had a single function, aka it is not a stack. But now your big Pharma is “listening to the masses” and turning towards the stack biohacking culture. Novo Nordisk, producer of Ozempic, is patenting a single molecule that does triple the work. Meanwhile, the internet is teaching people to build the stack themselves with grey and black market peptides.

This week's patent is the "new Ozempic" from Novo Nordisk. A few weeks ago, you loved hearing about how the original Ozempic patent is expiring. Now Novo Nordisk is tripling down, filing for a single molecule with triple the action.

This patent was filed by Novo Nordisk A/S, a company whose core competence is injectable peptide medicines for metabolic disease. The filing is aimed at a very specific engineering problem of how to put three drugs’ worth of signaling into one molecule without losing potency, stability, or dose practicality.

Peptides such as ozempic were once used predominantly for those with the objective health problem of diabetes. It was what pharmaceuticals should be for… healthcare. 

In a world where “biohacking” is becoming the new norm, this pharmaceutical patent signals a shift towards solving a trendy problem. For those who don’t feel as though they have the time or even discipline to optimize their health, peptides offer a solution. Then there are even the most disciplined in sporting fields, Serena Williams, promoting peptides too… In the recent Ro ad, she claims while many people think taking a peptide “for weight loss is a shortcut. It’s not. It’s science.” We would disagree. Yes, it is science, but it is still widely used as a shortcut too. 

As you read on, consider the danger of uninformed health trends influencing the regulated pharmaceutical market, such as taking grey market imported peptides that were not designed for human consumption (but rather designed for research purposes).

They are trying to make one single drug molecule that can “press” three different metabolic buttons in the body at once. The patent builds a single tri-agonist peptide.

[Tri-agonist → one molecule that activates three different receptor systems. 

Receptor → the cell’s “antenna” that receives a chemical signal. 

Agonist → a molecule that turns that antenna on.]

The architecture of the molecule is like a two-part tool connected by a short flexible connector:

So it’s basically Z1 + hinge + Z2. The filing’s logic is that you cannot just glue two active peptides together and expect the combined molecule to keep the right shape, flexibility, and receptor engagement.

This one molecule is designed to activate:

The point is not that each of these is “new.” The point is that putting them into one molecule creates a balancing problem. It is easy to build something that activates three targets weakly or unevenly, and much harder to get strong activation across all three while keeping the molecule manufacturable and dosable.

The patent also engineers for longer persistence in the body.

The filing is solving two linked problems that break multi-target peptide designs:

The patent cannot directly answer tolerability, nausea, or adherence. Still, the mechanism implies a few realistic differences in what taking a tri-agonist could feel like versus GLP-1 only, or versus stacking multiple medicines.

If it were a single prescribed product, the simplest experience is fewer moving parts. One device, one titration plan, one set of instructions. That matters because stacking creates operational burden, with multiple injections, multiple refill cycles, and more opportunities to mis-time doses or mis-handle storage.

However, a single tri-agonist also removes flexibility. With multiple medications, clinicians can adjust each component separately. With one molecule, the “ratio” of GLP-1-like, GIP-like, and amylin-like activity is fixed by the chemistry. If a patient loves two effects and hates the third, you cannot turn down just one lever.

In the real world, appetite reduction is not automatically experienced as “healthy satiety.” Many people interpret strong appetite suppression through the lens of comfort and function: nausea, fatigue, constipation, food aversion, and social disruption. The filing’s animal results show that appetite can be driven down hard. What it does not show is whether that is experienced as clean satiety or as a tolerability ceiling in humans.

Ozempic might be turning to a ‘3-in-1’ marketing strategy, in the face of social media biohacking trends that encourage peptides for non-diabetic purposes. Perhaps this can combat the grey and black markets of peptides that encourage individuals to stack multiple peptides off their own accord. Perhaps the ‘3-in-1’ strategy makes the product less feasible, as we discussed with potential nauseating side effects and lack of customizable solutions above. We can compare it to the ‘3-in-1’ Shampoo / Conditioner / Body Wash products. Bundling sounds cleaner and easier, but you can end up with a product that is decent at everything and perfect at nothing, plus harder to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. However, It can be better than Ozempic at weight-loss because it activates multiple appetite and glucose-control pathways at once, which may produce greater and more durable weight loss than targeting GLP-1 alone.

That framing matters because this patent from Novo Nordisk is, at its core, an attempt to productize stacking.
This shift is in step with how people are already talking about democratizing peptides. People do not debate receptor pharmacology online. They debate “stronger,” “cleaner,” “less nausea,” “more convenient.” “Triple-target” is a simple story hook, even if the reality is messy.

Plus, the grey market is encouraging people to think in stacks. Online peptide culture has normalized self administered “protocols” and “stacks” as a consumer behavior, whether medicine endorses it or not. That makes the leap from GLP-1 only to “3-in-1” feel intuitive, even inevitable. It also creates a ready-made demand for “the next thing,” including unapproved compounds.

You essentially get two reinforcing distribution engines.

A) The regulated engine (brand, reimbursement, trust).
A successful tri-agonist becomes a premium, standardized product with consistent manufacturing, predictable concentration, labeling, adverse-event monitoring, and a clear approval pathway. The message is convenience plus quality control.

B) The shadow engine (access arbitrage).
The grey market monetizes gaps via price, supply constraints, and impatience. It also aligns for the strange biohacking trend where users are happy to take non-FDA-approved drugs because an influencer on social media told them to. When demand outruns access, a parallel supply chain predictably forms, often hiding behind “research use only” language while still coaching human dosing. And then human consumers wonder why they don’t garner sympathy when they face adverse side effects from a research drug designed for lab-rats.

Regulation

Regulators are explicitly calling out this issue. Unapproved products labeled “for research” or “not for human consumption” sold directly to consumers, sometimes with dosing instructions.

They are also warning about concrete harms of dosing errors, misleading labeling, and products that do not meet quality standards.

Now, we may also need to consider how advertising codes are addressing ads such as Ro’s Superbowl Ad. Should we ads encouraging weight loss injectables in a nationwide broadcasting slot, where we know that many young impressionable viewers are watching?

Start in Denmark, where Novo Nordisk reported 2025 sales for Ozempic of about US$20b. (novonordisk.com)

Now jump to China, where the demand is real yet Reuters reports Ozempic sales in the “greater China” region fell 7% in 2025 to about US$853m, Novo’s first regional decline since launch there. The same piece suggests that the decline is due to strong price competition from new rivals and insurance reimbursement dynamics.(reuters.com)

Then zoom out to the United States, where “peptides” stopped being a niche word and turned into dinner conversation. A KFF poll found about 1 in 8 adults say they have ever taken a GLP-1 drug, and 1/16 say they are currently taking one. That is mainstream penetration, not a subculture, and it most certainly strays from medical use. (kff.org)

And once something is mainstream, the distribution wars start. This week’s cleanest signal is pricing and channel warfare. Hims & Hers Health launched a compounded “copy” of Novo’s Wegovy pill at $49 for the first month and $99 after (under a multi-month plan), undercutting Novo’s own pill pricing ($149 to $199 depending on the plan). Novo says it will take legal action. (reuters.com)

Regulators are watching this turn from awkward into adversarial. Reuters quotes Marty Makary warning that with “illegal copycat drugs,” safety and efficacy cannot be verified. (reuters.com)

Meanwhile, the grey and black markets are not hypothetical. In the UK, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said it seized illegal medicines worth almost £45m in 2025, including 5,680 GLP-1 pens, out of nearly 20 million doses of illicit products overall. That is a hard, counted number, and it is still only a lower bound on what moved through the system.

Soylent demonstrates where “optimization culture” ends up once it escapes the lab. It began as Silicon Valley’s “complete nutrition” meal-in-a-bottle, then got bought into a roll-up portfolio by Starco Brands in 2023. By Starco’s own segment reporting, Soylent did $20.2m in gross revenues in the first nine months of 2025. That is the dystopian biohacker arc in spreadsheet form. There is a nutrition obsession that breaks down the very integrity of the food we consume and hunger becomes a bug to patch. So what happens to basic human function of appetite as a signal, eating as a social ritual, and rest as non-negotiable? At what point does “efficiency” start looking self-destructive?

Health starts to become a question of how many shortcuts you can take for the fastest path to gratification. And as the FDA warns, these shortcuts carry immense risk. To complement the scientific warnings, we should also ask ourselves how these shortcuts slice through the emotional fabric of what makes our human lives great.

If you are curious about the impact of Ozempic’s original patent expiry in 2026, check out our past newsletter How 2026’s expiring patents will change your life. 

GLP-1 only created the category, but the next narrative is “more levers in one shot,” and the distribution fight is spilling into compounding, copycats, and outright illicit supply. 

This is exactly why a tri-agonist patent matters now. It is the regulated version of stacking, arriving at the same moment the internet is teaching people to stack with vials of unknown origin.

Ready to explore this shift for yourself? Dive into the details: WO 2025/114501 A1.

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