• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, April 17, 2025

“It’s time to compound an old-fashioned cure for high drug prices,” blared a full-page ad on the back cover of The Wall Street Journal last week.

“When overseas companies charge Americans 2X or more for life-saving drugs, those drugs should be added to a High-Priced Drug List to spur U.S. competition,” the copy continued. “This simple fix would drive down costs and help end the prescription drug crisis.”

The ad was placed by Noom, and the word “compound” in the first line sheds light on why it was created.

Noom’s concept of a High-Priced Drug List would, in essence, allow the company to keep selling a compounded GLP-1 drug.

In the past couple of years, Noom has pivoted from being an app largely focused on behavioral change for weight loss to one now largely centered around selling a much-lower-priced compounded version of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic/Wegovy (semaglutide).

Pharmacies have only been allowed to compound semaglutide due to Ozempic/Wegovy’s inclusion on the FDA’s “shortage list.” That shortage has now ended, with the FDA requiring pharmacies to stop compounding the drug by June.

Under Noom’s proposal, though, compounding would be allowed for any brands placed on a hypothetical High-Priced Drug List.

Pharma & Health Insider spoke with Noom CEO Geoff Cook about the proposal and Noom.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Pharma & Health Insider: How have GLP-1s changed Noom?

Geoff Cook: Noom has been prescribing GLP-1s since May 2023, and for about a year-and-a-half, we only prescribed brand-name drugs. When I joined Noom [July 2023], I observed that 90% of people coming through that program were unable to access the medication for various reasons. The two biggest: the price was too high, or their pharmacy didn’t have it.

I wanted to make our program work for GLP-1 users, so we rethought the entirety of Noom and built it from the ground up for those users. Instead of being about caloric resistance, it became about protein intake and driving resistance, to combat the muscle wastage that people on GLP-1 tend to experience.

In September 2024, we launched compounded semaglutide. The uptake was immediate, and the benefits to patients were significant. More than 50% of our med business is now compounded.

P&HI: How much of Noom’s business is now meds?

Cook: More than half our revenue is still the flagship habits program that Noom is most known for. But we went from 5% of our business being GLP-1-oriented to more than 33% in four or five months.

The benefit of combining the medication with habits is the value Noom adds. You can get your meds from different places, but 85% of folks will come off the meds by month 24. Uunless some underlying habits change, you’re not doing the patient a particular service in the long run.

P&HI: How did the idea for a High-Priced Drug List proposal come about?

Cook: There’s a massive price difference in prescription drugs between the U.S. and every other country in the world.

A recent Noom survey of both members and non-members with type 2 diabetes or obesity showed that seven out of eight wouldn't even consider a GLP-1 if it cost $499 a month, which is the cash pay price. If it were $99, six out of 10 would consider it. It became self-evident that price is an access issue.

So, what would we advocate for? We wanted [our proposal] to be transformative, make a difference, and be practical so it could be implemented.

P&HI: And that’s why the WSJ ad emphasizes overseas companies?

Cook: The U.S. leads in taxpayer-funded public health research. Pharma companies then develop it elsewhere in the world and sell it back to us, at many multiples of the price they sell it everywhere else.

We decided to focus our attention on that aspect of it, because the decision-maker who can make this happen is someone at HHS or FDA, and they could do it by simply reinterpreting how they think about demand in a shortage to get a High-Priced Drug List.

P&HI: Who was the ad’s target audience?

Cook: We were trying to put the idea into the ecosystem: to get the concept in its most distilled form to as many people as possible, to start conversations, and support in-person advocacy work. I’ve been in Washington meeting with different Congressmen’s offices. We’re meeting with folks at think tanks.

P&HI: The ad provided a scannable code and link to a page where people can sign a petition. How many signatures do you seek?

Cook: It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 or a million. At the end of the day, we want to convince a small handful of really powerful people.

P&HI: Are you looking for other companies to support your effort?

Cook: Our head of government affairs is calling on certain competitors, using the Wall Street Journal ad as the entrée.

P&HI: How would potential tariffs on imported drugs affect your proposal?

Cook:  A tariff would raise the price of pharmaceuticals in this country and might lead to shortages as well. You’re not going to see a wholesale movement of API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) manufacturing to the U.S. There’s a reason many pharmaceutical companies get that API from India and China – because there’s pollution involved in the production.

P&HI: Because of the WSJ ad, we’ve talked largely about meds and Noom’s weight loss aspect. But the app has also been changing from strictly weight loss management to more of a telehealth platform, right?

Cook: We see an opportunity to go beyond metabolic health by expanding the number of conditions we treat, especially those that yield to a combination of medication and lifestyle change. We launched hormone replacement [HRT] about a month ago.

For post-menopausal women, the loss of estrogen leads to a slowing of metabolism, which leads to weight gain, especially around the midsection. Combining HRT with some other intervention, whether that’s habits or habits plus GLP-1s, shows much better results in clinical studies.