By Maggie Fick

Copyright reuters

CompaniesNovo Nordisk A/SEli Lilly and Co

VIENNA, Sept 18 (Reuters) – Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk has cut a U.S. sales team focused on obesity and diabetes education for healthcare providers, according to two sources close to the company and LinkedIn posts reviewed by Reuters, an early sign of the drugmaker’s push to cut costs and regain ground on rival Eli Lilly (LLY.N), opens new tab.

The team, known internally as cardiometabolic educators, sat within Novo Nordisk’s (NOVOb.CO), opens new tab commercial division and included several hundred staff, sources said. The team was told last week that their roles would be terminated, they said.

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The specific layoffs, previously unreported, give the first signal of how the Danish drugmaker’s new CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar is scaling back operations after announcing broader restructuring that will include 9,000 job cuts globally.

A Novo spokesperson said the company would not detail the locations or business divisions where jobs were being eliminated.

“This process takes time, and our highest priority is to support our employees,” the spokesperson said.

The restructuring has gone down well initially with investors, helping boost the firm’s shares after it lost its dominance in the U.S. market for weight loss drugs to Eli Lilly. Novo has lost over $400 billion in market capitalization since the middle of last year, following profit warnings and management change.

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The two sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the specific layoffs have not been made public, said that the team was disbanded last Friday, two days after Novo announced the wider cuts without detailing which roles would be affected. They were told they should cease work this month but that they would be paid until the end of the year.

“Lilly does not have an education team and Novo has decided it doesn’t need one,” said one of the sources.

Reuters identified eight Novo employees on LinkedIn with the current job title of “cardiometabolic educator” who posted publicly that they are looking for new work or have been let go. Reuters attempted to contact all of them but none of them responded.

One referred to a “national displacement affecting the Novo Nordisk cardiometabolic educator department” and another wrote that “the entire U.S. cardiometabolic education team was eliminated”.

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Big pharmaceutical companies often provide so-called “disease state education” to raise awareness of medical conditions ahead of a product launch or label expansion.

Reporting by Maggie Fick; Editing by Susan Fenton and Nia Williams

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Maggie FickThomson ReutersMaggie is a Britain-based reporter covering the European pharmaceuticals industry with a global perspective. In 2023, Maggie’s coverage of Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk and its race to increase production of its new weight-loss drug helped the Health & Pharma team win a Reuters Journalists of the Year award in the Beat Coverage of the Year category. Since November 2023, she has also been participating in Reuters coverage related to the Israel-Hamas war. Previously based in Nairobi and Cairo for Reuters and in Lagos for the Financial Times, Maggie got her start in journalism in 2010 as a freelancer for The Associated Press in South Sudan.