Blockbuster Drugs, Women Inventors and the Manufactured Patient: Patents, Extraction and Exploitation in the GLP 1 Era

GLP‑1 analogue drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro have rapidly become ubiquitous in Western health systems and popular culture, promoted as a convenient “fix” for weight loss. This seminar uses the controversy surrounding scientist Svetlana Mojsov’s omission from foundational GLP‑1 patents to examine how gendered absence from patent inventorship is materially consequential but also politically ambivalent. Drawing on critical patent studies and political economy, I argue that a narrow reform agenda focussed on adding women to patents risks legitimising and stabilising a wider apparatus of extraction and exploitation: patents and related exclusivities consolidate market power, facilitate price‑setting and access constraints, and enable demand‑shaping through curated narratives – sometimes through illicit or ethically dubious marketing practices. By reading Mojsov’s story alongside the contemporary GLP‑1 analogue market, the “missing women inventors” problem is reframed within the broader production of the manufactured patient: consumers constituted through biomedical promise, scarcity, and social stratification. The talk concludes by asking what a feminist-grounded critique of pharmaceutical innovation and exclusivity might demand beyond recognition.

Jessica Lai is Professor of Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, where she specialises in intellectual property (IP). She researches on feminist perspectives on patent law, women in IP, and the protection of Māori knowledge. Professor Lai is currently a New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi  Rutherford Discovery Fellow.