The Novo Nordisk Foundation, the majority owner of Novo Nordisk, plans to put more money into regenerative medicines, including stem cells and cell therapies for a wide range of diseases.
The decision, announced Thursday, signals how the foundation plans to reinvest some of its huge profits from the blockbuster diabetes and obesity drug semaglutide, which includes the brands Ozempic and Wegovy. Those drugs have catapulted Novo Nordisk into the upper echelons of pharma market caps — alongside the other major GLP-1 drugmaker, Eli Lilly — and are even reshaping the Danish economy.
Novo Nordisk Foundation CEO Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen exclusively told Endpoints News that it can focus on riskier work because the foundation isn’t beholden to the whims of a venture capital timeline, the public market or quarterly reports.
“A venture capital company, they’re looking at an exit,” Thomsen said. “They’re not willing to take a high-risk bet that will take 10 years to come to fruition. It’s simply not in the business case.”
The Novo Nordisk Foundation manages roughly $200 billion in assets, $20 billion of which is liquid. Of that, about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion is doled out in grants each year, Thomsen said.
So far, the foundation has committed to giving out $300 million in grants through 2031 and putting between $100 million to $200 million into manufacturing facilities as part of the new emphasis. The grant effort, which launched at the end of 2021, allows scientists and research institutions to conduct early-stage research and eventually spin out their own biotechs or partner with larger pharma companies to develop cell therapies.
About half of the grant money is going toward researchers in Denmark, and the other half is being given out in two other countries where the Novo Nordisk Foundation operates: the Netherlands and Australia. Thomsen said it follows a “hub-and-spokes” model, in which Denmark serves as the hub, and that Novo would continue to invest significantly in these regions.
By building cell therapy manufacturing facilities in addition to funding the research, the Novo Nordisk Foundation aims to reduce the number of promising therapies that never get to clinical trials. It could also help companies scale from preclinical toxicology all the way up to clinical good manufacturing practices, he said.
“That is one of the things we’re trying to fix, to get out of the ‘valley of death’ by offering unique and profound assistance and direct help in taking research results and scaling them up to high-quality cells that can be used in the clinic,” Thomsen said.
He said regenerative medicines could be fruitful in Parkinson’s disease, heart and kidney failure, ulcerative colitis and type 1 diabetes. The latter, for example, could see cells restored that had been attacked by their immune system, he said.
While much of the focus will be on cell therapy and designing better stem cells, the foundation won’t shy away from other modalities like small molecules that can be regenerative, Thomsen said. There will also be some work using genome sequencing as a tool to optimize new drugs.
“That’s one big bucket, what I call cell regeneration, regenerative medicine based on cell replacement,” Thomsen said. “The other part is screening drugs, using systems where you have stem cells and see — can these drug-like molecules, can they differentiate the stem cells so that you in vivo, use them as a tablet, and they then circulate to your own stem cells and make them generate new beta cells or heart cells or brain cells.”