Zealand Pharma CMD key takeaways

Yesterday, Zealand Pharma hosted a CMD outlining its ambition to become a generational metabolic health company. The company highlighted key programs survodutide and petrelintide, and outlined plans to build a broader amylin franchise with plans for oral small molecule enabled by its newly announced collaboration with OTR therapeutics, as well as longer acting monthly amylin products. Zealand aims for five product launches in the next five years, and 10+ clinical pipeline programs by 2030. The company will establish a Boston hub which will integrate AI/ML and its 25 year peptide dataset to accelerate drug discovery. Financially, the company is funded to meet its obligations as part of the Roche partnership, expand R&D spending by five-fold, with a clear path to profitability without the need to raise additional capital. BUY and DKK 1,120 maintained.
Zealand aims to become a generational metabolic health company
Zealand framed obesity as a societal rather than individual problem, stressing its impact across cardiovascular, endocrine, liver and gut, renal, musculoskeletal and mental health systems, and its association with more than 200 complications. Using the analogy of building cars instead of faster horses, management positioned the company for step change innovation beyond today's GLP 1 incumbents. The ambition is to shape obesity care for decades not cycles, supported by a planned fivefold increase in research investment from roughly DKK 1b to around DKK 5bn per year over the next five years, a US launchpad for metabolic medicines, and multiple waves of innovation across obesity and broader metabolic health. Zealand's stated goal is to become the fastest discovery engine in metabolic disease by 2030.

The obesity market remains underpenetrated
Management highlighted the scale and urgency of the opportunity. By 2030 around 50% of adults are expected to be impacted by obesity and already 35% of US children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years live with overweight/obesity. Yet in the US only around 3% of patients with obesity are currently treated with a GLP 1 while around 12% have ever been exposed to one. This means more patients have discontinued than remain on therapy. Among GLP 1 users 49% stop due to adverse events typically gastrointestinal in nature, 32% due to cost, and 19% due to access issues. >80% of users want to lose up to 20% of body weight. Within that, 63% aim for 10-20%, 20% aim for 1-9% weight loss, and 14% aim for 21-30% weight loss. The market is split between a prescriber driven segment with around 90% of GLP 1 prescriptions originating from primary care physicians and a consumer segment where 61 percent of US T2D patients self-refer and show strong willingness to pay. Zealand expects obesity to evolve similarly to hypertension with multiple drug classes competing on tolerability convenience and commercial execution.



Survodutide is positioned for obesity and MASH, obesity phase 3 data in 1H26