Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has announced it is partnering with US biotech Vivtex Corporation in a deal worth up to $2.1 billion to develop next-generation oral biologic medicines for obesity and diabetes.
The partnership will specifically focus on developing technologies that could allow biologic medicines, which are typically administered by injection due to poor absorption in the gastrointestinal tract, to be taken in pill form.
The collaboration follows the FDA’s late-2025 approval of Novo’s oral semaglutide pill for chronic weight management.
In the announcement, Novo said the partnership combines “Novo Nordisk’s deep expertise in peptide and protein therapeutics with Vivtex’s proprietary gastrointestinal screening and formulation platform to identify next-generation oral therapeutics.”
Under the agreement, Vivtex will license select oral drug-delivery technologies to Novo Nordisk, which will lead global development, regulatory filings, manufacturing and commercialization of any resulting therapies.
Vivtex is eligible to receive upfront payments, research funding and milestone payments totaling up to $2.1 billion, along with tiered royalties on future product sales if the drugs reach the market.
The collaboration aims to enable the oral delivery of biologic drug candidates that are traditionally limited to injectable administration due to poor absorption in the gastrointestinal tract.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at 11am EDT (5pm CEST/EU-Central)
“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. We launched the first-ever oral biologic more than five years ago and have recently launched the world’s first oral biologic for obesity,” said Brian Vandahl, Senior Vice President, Therapeutics Discovery, at Novo Nordisk.
The partnership combines Novo Nordisk’s deep expertise in peptide and protein therapeutics with Vivtex’s proprietary gastrointestinal screening and formulation platform to identify next-generation oral therapeutics.
Vivtex was founded in 2018 as a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by scientists, including biotech giant Robert Langer, Giovanni Traverso and CEO Thomas von Erlach. Its platform uses advanced screening systems, including AI-enabled formulation tools and living-tissue “gut-on-a-chip” models, to determine how drugs behave in the digestive system and how they can be optimized for oral delivery.
“Making biologics oral has been one of the most difficult challenges in drug delivery,” said Thomas von Erlach, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivtex. “Vivtex was founded to systematically solve this problem by integrating high-throughput experimentation with computational and AI-enabled analytics. Partnering with Novo Nordisk allows us to apply our platform across important metabolic disease areas, with the goal of enabling oral therapies that would otherwise require injection.”
Novo has been facing some turbulence marked by leadership changes, job cuts and a Phase III setback for its CagriSema obesity drug against Lilly’s Zepbound. Still, the company recently beat its rival to market with a GLP-1 weight-loss pill, with oral Wegovy recording about 20,000 prescriptions in its second week.
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