May 24, 2024
Ozempic Maker Novo Nordisk Halts Roof Repairs for Probe After Factory Fire
, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- Novo Nordisk A/S has halted roof repairs across its sites as it investigates last week’s fire at the Danish manufacturing hub where it makes the key ingredient for its blockbuster weight-loss drug.
Novo will take corrective actions to ensure there’s not another fire, said Michael Hallgren, senior vice president of active pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing. Although a police and fire department investigation is still ongoing, Hallgren said, the fire at the sprawling factory complex in Kalundborg on May 16 appears to be unrelated to this week’s blaze at Novo’s headquarters outside Copenhagen.
“We will not make any roof repairs in any places before we have implemented the corrective actions,” Hallgren said in an interview on Friday. “Fire is always the biggest threat that we have.”
The fire in Kalundborg caused extensive damage to the roof of a utility building that’s under construction as part of Novo’s more than $8 billion expansion of the site. The drugmaker is doing an unprecedented scale of construction projects in order to build capacity for diabetes drug Ozempic and obesity medicine Wegovy amid exploding demand.
Novo has installed a temporary roof on the utility building in Kalundborg, and the timeline on the expansion project there remains unaffected, Hallgren said.
“Normally we do not have fires, but normally we are also not investing as we are doing now,” Hallgren said. “When you’re doing a lot of new stuff, it also comes with a risk that something goes wrong, and of course we shall not accept that.”
Corrective actions could include supplying all roofs with permanent pipes for water, he said. Although the fire in Kalundborg was extinguished within an hour of the fire department being called, workers didn’t have enough equipment themselves to put it out, he said.
The fire at Novo’s campus in Bagsvaerd this Wednesday took longer to extinguish, destroying an office building. Police have said it could be several days or weeks before they can determine the cause.
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