Novo Nordisk announced Wednesday a collaboration with startup Vivtex that’ll give it access to technologies that could yield new oral biologics for obesity and other metabolic diseases.
The companies did not disclose the amount of guaranteed cash going from Novo to Vivtex in the deal. But the Boston biotechnology startup stands to gain as much as $2.1 billion, as well as sales royalties, if drugs emerging from the alliance progress and are eventually commercialized.
Biologics are typically delivered via injections or intravenous infusions. These drugs are harder to pack into pills because of their large size and difficulty getting through the stomach and digestive tract. But an array of technical advancements have helped companies make progress, and Novo’s own portfolio is one example. The Danish pharmaceutical firm brought the first oral biologic, the diabetes drug Rybelsus, to market in 2019. And at the end of 2025, U.S. regulators handed the company an approval for an oral form of its blockbuster obesity medicine Wegovy.
The Vivtex deal gives Novo a chance at more oral biologics and is part of an effort to lean on “both internal and external innovation” to find new cardiometabolic medicines, Brian Vandahl, the company’s senior vice president of therapeutics discovery, said in a statement.
Vivtex started out as a developer of diagnostics with a drug screening technology. But it’s since become a frequent partner of companies aiming to develop oral biologics. Since early 2024, the company has formed alliances with Novo, Astellas Pharma, Orbis Medicines, Equillium and AI Proteins. It uses a type of “gut-on-a-chip” approach enabling it to quickly test many possible formulations of a drug in the hopes of finding one that can best pass through the GI system and be taken up by the body.
“We realize there's a big need for having drugs available orally, and from what we can tell, every single patient indication would prefer to have a drug available via oral instead of needle administration,” said Thomas von Erlach, Vivtex’s CEO, in an interview with BioPharma Dive.
The deal Vivtek struck with Novo has been years in the making, Erlach said. He co-founded the company in 2018 with MIT professors Giovanni Traverso and Bob Langer, both of which have helped create many biotechnology startups.
“Advancements that make biologic medicines easier to take, while preserving their effectiveness, have the potential to significantly change patient care,” Langer said in a statement.
