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Comment by adam_arthur | Hacker News Reader

You can buy pharmacy compounded semaglutide through online portals, e.g. Ro

It's $450/month out of pocket (no insurance coverage)

Therefor, there will actually be price competition and we should see pretty cheap prices in the coming years.

I'm not sure exactly why pharmacies are free to compound it independently. I guess whatever patents exist on Ozempic/Wegovy etc aren't sufficient to squash competition.

The $1000/month for Ozempic is purely a name brand markup. I'd guess we'll see prices closer to $100/month for the compounded variants within a few years

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There are dangers/risks to buying pharmacy compounded semaglutide -- not really a great thing to recommend widely. It's hard to depend on whatever pharmacy people might be able to find locally or through some hopefully trustworthy portal.

That said, with China and more notably India entering the GLP1 RA race, there will be much cheaper options very soon, hopefully!

Can you articulate those dangers? Compounding is a well developed means of sourcing drugs and GLP has been around for decades. What specifically should people be mindful of?

Well quality of the compounder/pharmacy is the real issue here -- of course it's not that the process itself is flawed, more that it's basically impossible for a layman consumer to inspect/assess quality/safety.

How does the layman consumer inspect/assess the quality/safety of other drugs or really any other substance that they ingest?

That's a fair question - they obviously can't inspect pharmaceutical factories. That said, the FDA has much more power to regulate drug manufacturers than pharmacists and most drugs are manufactured in a few locations that are much easier to inspect. They only have to make sure one or two locations are set up correctly and a significant chunk of the application for clinical trials is quality control procedures.

There are shady online compounding pharmacies based in other countries and you don’t know what you’re getting, as with any prescription drug. I’m guessing that was he meant.

But from a reputable one regulated by an industrialized nation, it would not be fitting to call them dangerous.

Relevant supporting FDA article: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding/compounding...

I have bought generics from India but can we really say GLP1 generics in India are better than compounded GLP1 in the US? It seems inconsistent to recommend one over the other.

Well I'm more looking for GLP1 generics developed whole-cloth in India.

India is quite good at pharmaceuticals -- their generics basically serve the rest of the world that are priced out of US-made products IIRC.

Ex. their generic version of Paxlovid:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Basically, with the expiring patents coming up on a bunch of these drugs:

https://www.biospace.com/article/9-drugs-losing-patents-or-e...

We're going to be in interesting waters soon.

> Therefor, there will actually be price competition and we should see pretty cheap prices in the coming years.

Considering how man times pharmaceutical companies have been lightly taken to task for doing the exact opposite, this seems extremely optimistic.

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