Eli Lilly’s Zepbound injection pen placed in the Brooklyn borough of New York on March 28, 2024.
Shelby Knowles | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Eli Lilly on Monday launched Zepbound, a new form of its hit obesity drug that delivers a month’s worth of doses in a single pen.
Cash-paying patients can obtain the multi-dose device, called the KwikPen, through the company’s direct-to-consumer website LillyDirect. Pricing starts at $299 per month for the lowest dosage level.
Pens may be a more convenient option for some patients because they reduce the number of devices they must use over the course of a month to take their medication. Patients can take Zepbound four times a week using one pen.
Currently, patients on treatment use a different single-dose autoinjector each week. Lilly also offers single-dose vials of Zepbound that require users to draw the drug into a syringe and inject themselves.
The announcement comes as Lilly works to maintain Zepbound’s early success, which has seen demand explode since it first entered the market in late 2023. LillyDirect has been key to Zepbound’s growth, and rolling out new forms of medicine on the platform could attract even more patients.
Zepbound’s phenomenal growth has enabled Eli Lilly to wrest a majority share of the weight loss drug market from rival Novo Nordisk. In the company’s fourth quarter, Zepbound brought in $4.2 billion in U.S. revenue, up 122% year-over-year.
Lilly said in a release that the Food and Drug Administration has approved Zepbound’s label expansion to include multi-dose devices.
KwikPen is already used in other drugs, including Lilly’s popular diabetes drug Mounjaro.
“As part of our commitment to help people living with obesity manage their weight, we are introducing a new option in the Zepbound KwikPen, a device trusted by patients around the world and in the U.S. like other Lilly medicines,” Ilya Yuffa, president of Lilly USA and Global Customer Capabilities, said in a release.
