Semaglutide in Canada: The Patent That Lapsed Over a Fee

Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, had a Canadian patent on semaglutide, the molecule inside it, and in 2019 it did not pay a maintenance fee of CAD $250 to keep that patent alive. The patent, CA 2601784, lapsed permanently. On April 28, 2026, Health Canada authorized a generic semaglutide injection from Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, making Canada the first G7 country to approve a generic version of the drug, and generic launches began from mid-May 2026.

So the short version of the semaglutide Canada story is this. Generic copies of Ozempic are approved there now: Dr. Reddy’s first, then Apotex on May 1, 2026, then on June 29, 2026 a generic version of Wegovy from Apotex called Sevmia. More filings are in the queue. A large part of the reason this happened in Canada years before the United States is a fee of about the size of a nice dinner (CAD $250 is roughly $180 US, depending on the day).

Surely nobody loses a patent over $250?

This is the sensible reaction, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Novo Nordisk is a very large company. Ozempic was Canada’s best-selling drug in 2025, with $2.9 billion in sales (Canadian dollars, so roughly $2 billion and change US), more than three times the next best-selling drug, and over a million Canadians were on it when the generic was approved. That is a reasonably popular product. The obvious assumption is that a company with that much at stake has a person whose entire job is paying small fees on time, and a second person checking the first person, and a calendar reminder, etc.

And the system agrees with you, sort of. It assumes people forget stuff. Before October 30, 2019, if you missed a maintenance fee deadline on a granted Canadian patent, you had 12 months as of right to pay the missed fee plus a late fee before the patent actually lapsed. The late fee, per a guide to patent maintenance fees, is CAD 150 (as of 2024 and 2025). A podcast from ipCapital Group titled its episode “Ozempic Makes Billions. Its Canadian Patent Fee Was $450,” which gets at the general scale of things: whatever the exact all-in number was, it was a few hundred Canadian dollars.

So the objection is right that there was a safety net. The weird part is that the patent fell through it anyway.

How a Canadian maintenance fee actually works

Here is the mechanism stated as plainly as possible. Canada lets you own an invention for about twenty years, but it charges you rent every year to keep owning it, and if you stop paying rent, the invention stops being yours and becomes everyone’s. This is called a patent maintenance fee.

The rent goes up as the patent ages. As of 2025, standard Canadian fees were CAD 130.50 a year for the 2nd through 4th anniversaries of filing, CAD 289.19 for the 5th through 9th, CAD 362.27 for the 10th through 14th, and CAD 651.46 for the 15th through 19th. The logic is sort of elegant: early on, when you do not know if your invention is worth anything, it is cheap; later, if you are still paying, presumably it is worth something.

The mundane comparison is a storage unit. You rent a locker, you pay monthly, and if you stop paying, the facility sends a notice, waits a while, and then auctions off the contents. Nobody at the storage facility asks whether the locker contains old furniture or the original manuscript of a bestselling novel. The fee is the same either way. Canada’s patent office is the storage facility, and in this case the locker contained the active ingredient of the country’s best-selling drug.

A reinstated application, for what it is worth, requires a reinstatement request, the missed fee, a reinstatement fee and late fee, and a demonstration of “due care.” That last phrase is where Canadian patent lawyers spend a lot of their time, and it is the kind of thing I would explain at much greater length if anyone had ever asked me to at a party (nobody has).

Was it a mistake?

I don’t know, and the facts here do not settle it. The UK law firm Reddie & Grose ran a piece under the headline “A Key Ozempic Patent Lapses in Canada - Deliberate or a Mistake?” which is the honest framing: the question mark is doing real work. Fortune reported on the lapse on June 17, 2025, and Patent Lawyer Magazine titled its own article “highlighting the need to maintain patent protection in Canada,” which is the profession’s polite way of saying “please pay your fees.”

The deliberate theory is not crazy, for instance. Companies drop patents all the time when they think the patent is not worth the rent, or when they think other patents cover the same ground. If all the fees had been paid, CA 2601784 would have expired on March 20, 2026 anyway. And Canada also has data protection, a separate thing that keeps generics from relying on the brand’s clinical data for a while; for semaglutide that ended January 4, 2026. So the window in which the patent alone was doing anything was narrower than the headlines suggest.

Here is the stranger part. That patent had a supplementary protection certificate, a sort of bonus term Canada grants for drugs, which would have extended protection to March 20, 2028. The lapse voided it. One source describes this as “opening the market nearly two years earlier than expected.” So the $250 was not really buying the remaining years of the patent. It was buying the right to the bonus years, and the bonus years were the expensive part.

You can picture the meeting, if there was one. “Hey, do we still need the Canadian one?” “I think the other stuff covers it.” “Cool, skip it.” That is invented, to be clear. It is not settled whether anything like it happened.

Who has filed with Health Canada, and who is approved

Once the patent was gone and data protection ran out, the gate was Health Canada’s review. The line at that gate has been long and somewhat blurry in its count, depending on when you check. As of July 2025, five generic semaglutide submissions were under review. As of May 1, 2026, after the second approval, Health Canada was reviewing seven other submissions. As of June 29, 2026, it was reviewing six others. One report puts the total at nine, including Sandoz, Apotex, Teva, Aspen Pharmacare and Taro Pharmaceuticals.

The approvals so far go like this. Dr. Reddy’s got the first, on April 28, 2026, a generic version of Ozempic for once-weekly treatment of adults with type 2 diabetes. Apotex got the second on May 1, 2026, same indication, within days. Apotex announced it under the headline “Apotex Becomes the First Canadian-Based Pharmaceutical Company to Receive Health Canada Approval for a Generic Equivalent of Ozempic,” which is a very precise way to be first at something when you finished second (press releases reward careful use of adjectives). Then on June 29, 2026, Health Canada authorized Sevmia, Apotex’s generic version of Wegovy, the first generic semaglutide for weight loss and the third generic semaglutide overall.

That last one is a little puzzling. One source said Wegovy (semaglutide at the 2.4 mg weekly dose) remained patent-protected as of Apotex’s May approval, and pen device patents for semaglutide in Canada are reported to run to at least 2033. By late June, Sevmia was authorized anyway. The facts here do not explain how those pieces fit together, and it would be easy to guess wrong.

The Dr. Reddy’s piece also has an Indian subplot. In December 2025, a single judge of the Delhi High Court refused Novo Nordisk an injunction against Dr. Reddy’s, which let Dr. Reddy’s manufacture semaglutide for export to markets where the patent had already lapsed. Canada was one of those markets. (India’s own compound patent lapsed on March 20, 2026, which is a story for another article.)

What generic semaglutide in Canada means for prices and cross-border buyers

The price signal so far is that Sandoz has said it may offer generic semaglutide discounts of up to 70% in Canada. “Up to” is carrying its usual weight, and whatever the actual shelf prices turn out to be is not settled by these facts.

The cross-border question is the one Americans actually care about. Canada is in the early wave of semaglutide patent expiry in 2026, alongside India, China, Brazil and South Africa. The UK, the big EU markets and Japan are around 2031. The United States is in the late wave, 2032 to 2033. So for the next several years there will be a cheap legal generic a short drive from Buffalo and an expensive patented brand on the near side of the border, which is the sort of arrangement that has a whole genre of road-trip movies waiting for it.

What that means legally for an American who wants the Canadian product is a separate question from what it costs, and these facts do not answer it. A drug being generic in Canada does not make it generic in the US, where the patents still run, and what happens to any individual buyer, pharmacy or importer at the border depends on US rules this article does not cover. The point is that the price gap is created by patent dates, and the patent dates are set country by country.

So the biggest drug in Canada was protected, in the end, by a calendar. Calendars are not that strong.