Novo Nordisk partners with MIT spinout Vivtex in deal worth up to $2.1bn to advance oral biologics for obesity

Under the agreement, Vivtex will license select oral drug-delivery technologies to Novo Nordisk, which will assume responsibility for global development, regulatory activities, manufacturing and commercialisation of any products that emerge. The companies did not disclose the guaranteed upfront payment.

The deal arrives at a strategically sensitive moment for Novo Nordisk, which earlier the same week released phase III data showing its next-generation injectable CagriSema failed to match Eli Lilly’s Zepbound in a head-to-head obesity study. With its injectable pipeline under pressure, the Vivtex partnership signals that Novo intends to compete aggressively in the oral delivery of biologic medicines.

“Novo Nordisk has been at the forefront of innovation in protein and peptide engineering for several decades, and not least within oral formulation of peptides,” said Brian Vandahl, senior vice president of therapeutics discovery at Novo Nordisk, in a joint press release. “We launched the first-ever oral biologic more than five years ago and have recently launched the world’s first oral biologic for obesity.”

A platform built on gut-on-a-chip screening

Vivtex was founded in 2018 by MIT scientists Thomas von Erlach, Giovanni Traverso and Robert Langer – the latter a prolific biotech entrepreneur whose co-founding credits include Moderna. The company’s proprietary GI-ORIS™ platform – a robotics-driven “GI tract on a chip” – can test thousands of oral formulations per day to identify those with the best chance of being absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract, where biologic drugs such as peptides and proteins are typically poorly absorbed, according to the press release.

“Making biologics oral has been one of the most difficult challenges in drug delivery,” said von Erlach in the same note. “Vivtex was founded to systematically solve this problem by integrating high-throughput experimentation with computational and AI-enabled analytics.”

Pills as the next battleground

Novo Nordisk, whose stock has lost roughly three-quarters of its value over pricing pressure and a string of setbacks since becoming Europe’s most valuable company roughly two years ago, nonetheless commands a lead in both the anti-obesity niche and the broader market for oral biologics. It brought Rybelsus (oral semaglutide) to market in 2019 as the first oral biologic for diabetes, and more recently, in December 2025, the FDA approved the Wegovy pill – the first oral GLP-1 for obesity – which launched in the US last month.

With fierce competition from Eli Lilly and others, the company is under pressure to maintain that edge. Last week, Novo Nordisk also announced a plan to further dramatically cut the prices of both its semaglutide products in the US starting January 1, 2027.

Experts say prices in the anti-obesity market are likely to continue on a steep downward curve, and that this will trigger second- and third-order effects that are difficult to quantify.

“After accounting for food and other savings (e.g., life insurance costs, etc. – things people don’t think hard enough about) these miracle treatments will be essentially free by [2030] if not sooner,” predicted the prominent health economist and Columbia Business School professor Neal Masia, in a recent LinkedIn post