No­vo Nordisk said Mon­day it will im­me­di­ate­ly drop its cash-pay prices for megablock­busters Ozem­pic and We­govy to $349 per month, more than six weeks be­fore Eli Lil­ly’s ri­val weight loss drug Zep­bound is ex­pect­ed to match that price.

The move is the lat­est jab by No­vo in a long-run­ning com­pe­ti­tion be­tween the two com­pa­nies and drug com­pounders. Both No­vo and Lil­ly pledged the near­ly $150 month­ly re­duc­tion for cash-pay­ing pa­tients as part of deals made with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion ear­li­er this month, with dis­counts made in ex­change for Medicare cov­er­age.

The cash price of both GLP-1 mak­ers’ in­jecta­bles will be low­ered to $250 per month in two years, ac­cord­ing to the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion. Month­ly sup­plies of the tablet ver­sions, if ap­proved by the FDA, will be sold for $150 on the White House­'s in­com­ing on­line phar­ma­cy TrumpRx, which is ex­pect­ed to launch ear­ly next year.

Coun­sel for Eli Lil­ly, No­var­tis and Bris­tol My­ers Squibb told a pan­el of judges that the gov­ern­ment’s re­bate pi­lot pro­gram is too lim­it­ed in scope to ad­dress drug­mak­ers’ broad­er con­cerns with the 340B sys­tem.

HH­S' Health Re­sources and Ser­vices Ad­min­is­tra­tion re­cent­ly ap­proved ap­pli­ca­tions from nine drug­mak­ers to par­tic­i­pate in a pi­lot that would sig­nif­i­cant­ly change the way the 340B dis­count pro­gram op­er­ates. For now, it on­ly ap­plies to the 10 drugs that were sub­ject to the first round of Medicare ne­go­ti­a­tions un­der the In­fla­tion Re­duc­tion Act.

“The prob­lem with the pi­lot pro­gram, of course, is it on­ly ap­plies to man­u­fac­tur­ers whose drugs have been cho­sen for drug price ne­go­ti­a­tion and on­ly to those drugs,” Cather­ine Stet­son, a Hogan Lovells at­tor­ney rep­re­sent­ing the three drug­mak­ers, said dur­ing a Mon­day oral ar­gu­ment be­fore the US Court of Ap­peals for the DC Cir­cuit.

Tar­iffs on brand­ed phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts from Switzer­land and Liecht­en­stein will be capped at 15% un­der a new trade deal with the US, the White House an­nounced.

The US will ap­ply whichev­er is high­est out of the "most fa­vored na­tion" (MFN) tar­iff rate or a 15% tax on goods orig­i­nat­ing from the two coun­tries, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion said on Fri­day. These levies will not ex­ceed 15% for any prod­ucts that are sub­ject to fu­ture phar­ma tar­iffs aris­ing from the De­part­ment of Com­merce's Sec­tion 232 in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

This lat­est deal mir­rors the de­tails of the US-EU deal an­nounced in Ju­ly and re­flects the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion's goal of boost­ing drug man­u­fac­tur­ing in the US, with over $480 bil­lion pledged to the coun­try so far this year.