chief executive lars fruergaard jØrgensen says obesity is a disease and thinks the company will learnfrom its growing number of patients. lars: when i ask the scientists, they say the priority and mechanism will tell you that it's chronic treatment. my personal view is that we will also learn that patients are much different, and there will be different avenues, so, we will have to build a portfolio of interventions. francine: on this episode of "leaders with lacqua," i travel to the firm's headquarters in copenhagen, denmark. i asked lars fruergaard jØrgensen about the global sensation, how he is navigating the company's meteoric rise, and the sweeping changes they could bring across a range of industries. lars, thank you so much for being on bloomberg with us. lars: francine, thanks for having me. francine: after decades of research, basically, novo finds a molecule that changes everything, in terms of weight loss drugs. were you taken by surprise at the appetite, actually, for these drugs and how mainstream they are? lars: yeah, i would actually say there are many surprises when yo

i asked the chief executive, lars fruergaard jorgensen, about regulatory pressures and future growth.o, how do you think about pricing? again, you must have gotten some difficult questions from governments, but also, this goes back to innovation. lars: most products are priced according to the value they bring. and i feel really good about the value of our medicines, what they bring to the individual patient, but also the value to the health care system. and we have, today, health care systems around the world who were typically designed for acute care. but finding that 80% of the cost in the health care system is linked to chronic care. and we have portfolio products that are really addressing some of the chronic diseases of our day and age. diabetes, obesity, and the comorbidities that follow that. we know that there are projections that say, by 2035, the world obesity federation predicts that the cost burden to society will be $4 trillion of the people living with obesity. and that cost is going to be, to a large degree, taken up by health care systems who are already struggling to