So would it be possible to buy the drug in Canada and ship to US?

I thought I had a decent handle on patent law, but maybe I'm missing something here.

Yes, the patent won't be valid for Canada, but you can't import a product into the US which would infringe on a US patent.

So, though there may be a small amount that would slip through the cracks, it isn't as if anyone in the US can now manufacture Semaglutide and distribute it.

Canada is such a small market, that many companies don't bother. Though, for the cost, it seems ridiculous a company as big as Novo didn't pay the $500...that may even have been in Canadian dollars. :)

> Prof. Michael Hoffman from Toronto put me on to the Canadian Patent Database, where you can find that Novo did file a patent there for semaglutide. . .but the last time they paid the annual maintenance fee on it was 2018!

> You can even find a letter where their lawyers send a refund request for the 2017 maintenance fee ($250) because Novo apparently wanted some more time to see if they wanted to pay it.

> On the same date in 2019, the office sent a letter saying that “The fee payable to maintain the rights accorded by the above patent was not received by the prescribed due date. . .”

> By that time it was $450 with the late fee added, but that was apparently too much for Novo. They had a one year grace period to make it up, and apparently never did, so their patent lapsed in Canada. And as the Canadian authorities remind them, “Once a patent has lapsed it cannot be revived”.

Impressive failure for "the second-largest semaglutide market in the world."

looking at the filing, they had their patent deadline extended due to COVID-19 eighteen times!

https://brevets-patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/26...

There's about to be a lot of skinny people in Canada bordering states. :)

AIUI, because they let the patent expire, the drug was not subject to price regulation by the government. So they could charge whatever.

And during most of that time, they were still protected by 'data exclusivity' which means that any generic producer could not get approved without doing their own clinical trials, until 8 years had passed.

So they gave up some period of exclusivity in return for being able to charge a higher price when they still had a monopoly.

Quoting myself <https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1md4wde/the_most_va...>:

>Novo Nordisk did not file for a renewal because of a mistake, or someone going on vacation, or anything like that.

>Novo Nordisk decided that the additional years of patent protection were not worth it compared to the advantage of the drug no longer being under the jurisdiction of the PMPRB <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patented_Medicine_Prices_Revie...>. Whether that decision was financially correct in light of GLP-1's subsequent application to weight loss, I do not know. However, again, it was not a silly mistake on Novo Nordisk's part.

I had never considered it-what makes a drug prescription vs OTC? Every substance has safety concerns(dose makes the poison), so with a lot of the financial gone, will the GLPs ever not require a prescription?

In Brazil it will expire in July 2026. It's pretty relevant as it's kinda already announced they will put the generics on the public health care (SUS) for free... Which is big deal as an Ozempic shot costs almost the same as the minimum wage.

This year they already did an analysis to include Ozempic, but it was denied, probably because of the cost difference...

But they were trying on justice to extend the patent...

Not only that, there is a legitimate raft of companies lining up to make generics.

There’s one wrinkle though, legally importing prescription drugs from Canada isn’t really allowed in the US/UK AFAIK. HIMS is probably feverishly figuring out how to do that right now.

Shameless plug:

https://glp1guide.substack.com/p/another-glp1-generic-launch...

Also somewhat separately, injectable GLP1s are about to be upstaged by oral variants — orfoglipron for Eli Lilly and the Wegovy Pill for Novo.

> Interviewer at Endpoints: You plan to potentially launch a generic GLP-1 in Canada and Brazil in 2026.

Looking at the original interview on Endpoints, Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor says this about Brazil:

In Brazil, the biggest prescribers are dentists. Everyone says, “Why dentists?” They do aesthetic work, and then you have your Botox, and then you want a bikini body. It’s behaving like an OTC consumer brand. Imagine selling this, rather than $300, at $50. Anybody over the age of 40 in Brazil will probably want to be on that.

But he doesn't explain how they got around the patents. Another comment on HN says they expire in July 2026, but can anyone explain why the patents expire so soon in Brazil?

It sounds like people will be flocking to Canada to fill their ozempic prescriptions. However, the WP just posted this article about how ordering rx meds from Canada has become unaffordable due to tariffs.

Many seniors get cheaper medicine from Canada. That might become harder https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/18/deminimis...

No paywall: https://archive.ph/nT0Jl

The whole story seems utterly insane to me. The fact that Novo Nordisk went back to ask for a refund of $250 they paid for the patent in 2017 shows that there was active intent behind this, this wasn't just some internal disconnect between payment systems that prevented the money from being sent to the government. Who at NN thought that saving, what, ~$1000 total was justified for this? I thought companies of this scale didn't even think on the scale of thousands of dollars anymore.

Oh well, at least we in Canada get more generic drug variants. Thanks!