Tesamorelin Cost: Why Egrifta Is the Only Lawful Price

The only tesamorelin you can lawfully buy in the United States is Egrifta WR™, a prescription biologic from Theratechnologies. There is no published cash price. The clearest public figure is Medicare's: in the first quarter of 2026, Part D plans spent an average of $11,523.05 per Egrifta WR claim.¹ Most people who pay far less than that are paying through insurance and the manufacturer's co-pay program, not a lower price.

The "$150 to $300 a month" figures that dominate search results are prices for compounded tesamorelin. That product has had no lawful compounding route since March 2020, for reasons set out below.

What Egrifta WR costs

Theratechnologies does not publish a list price, and CMS's retail acquisition survey, NADAC, has no line for Egrifta WR or any other tesamorelin product. It is a specialty drug, dispensed through specialty pharmacies rather than the retail counter NADAC surveys.

What CMS does publish is what Medicare Part D spends on it. The figures are gross spending before manufacturer rebates, so they measure the drug's price to the system rather than any patient's copay.

The prescribing information describes one Egrifta WR carton as four 11.6 mg vials with a 28-day supply of syringes and needles, and the dose as 1.28 mg injected once a day.² If each Medicare claim is one carton, a year of thirteen cartons comes to about $149,800 at that average. Treat that as the order of magnitude, not a quote. A claim can cover more or less than one carton, and what a commercial plan pays is not public.

Egrifta WR and the older Egrifta SV are not interchangeable. The label states that the two formulations differ in dose, the number of vials per dose, reconstitution and storage.²

Insurance and the manufacturer's support program

Because the gross price is so high, almost nobody pays it. Theratechnologies runs THERA patient support®, which lists three kinds of financial help:³

Commercial insurance

The THERA Egrifta WR Co-Pay Program "may help patients with private or commercial insurance lower their out-of-pocket costs."

Government insurance

THERA patient support "can assist with alternative funding" for patients on government plans.

Patient Assistance Program

Offers "qualifying patients THERA medications at no cost."

Its public pages state no co-pay cap and no income limit for free drug; eligibility is assessed on enrollment, which is open regardless of insurance status. The program's coordinators verify insurance, handle prior authorization and appeals, and find a specialty pharmacy in your plan's network. For most insured patients with the approved indication, the realistic cost is whatever remains after the plan and the co-pay program, and that can only be learned by enrolling.

Why "compounded tesamorelin" has no lawful route

Tesamorelin was approved in 2010 as a drug. On March 23, 2020, a change in federal law moved biological products that had been approved as drugs under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act into the biologics licensing system, and tesamorelin went with them. FDA's published list of applications deemed to be biologics licenses on that date includes "tesamorelin acetate," marketed as Egrifta and Egrifta SV, under former application 022505.⁴

The consequence for compounding is stated in FDA's own notice to compounders: "beginning on March 23, these transitioning biological products will not be eligible for the exemptions for compounded drugs under sections 503A and 503B of the FD&C Act."⁵ Section 503A covers compounding pharmacies and 503B covers outsourcing facilities. With neither exemption available, there is no lawful way to compound tesamorelin for a patient.

The line that put tesamorelin on the wrong side is size. Federal regulations define a protein as an amino acid polymer "greater than 40 amino acids in size."⁶ Tesamorelin is built on the 44-amino-acid sequence of human growth hormone-releasing factor.²

So when a page quotes a monthly price for compounded tesamorelin, it is quoting a price for a product with no lawful compounding route. Vials sold "for research use only" are not a lawful alternative either, because they are not sold for human use. We do not price, list or link any of them.

The approved indication vs belly-fat marketing

Egrifta WR is approved for one use: "the reduction of excess abdominal fat in HIV-infected adult patients with lipodystrophy."² The label adds three limits in the same section. Long-term cardiovascular safety has not been established. Treatment should be reconsidered in patients whose visceral fat has not fallen. And, in the label's words, it "is not indicated for weight loss management as it has a weight neutral effect."

That matters for cost as well as for safety. Plans cover specialty drugs for their approved use, usually after prior authorization, so a prescription written for general fat loss is unlikely to be covered. That puts the patient back at the gross price, with eligibility for the manufacturer's financial help assessed case by case.

Sermorelin: the compoundable relative

Sermorelin is a shorter fragment of the same hormone, 29 amino acids long, which keeps it under the 40-amino-acid line that moved tesamorelin into the biologics category. It is not an FDA-approved product today, but US compounding pharmacies dispense it on prescription, and it is priced at a small fraction of Egrifta.

Across the 7 companies we track that publish a sermorelin price, the no-commitment rate runs $99 to $330 a month. The dearest year among them, $3,960, is under a tenth of the Egrifta WR figure above.

The two are not substitutes. They are different molecules, sermorelin carries no approval for HIV-associated abdominal fat or for anything else, and a cheaper price is not evidence that it does the same job. We set them side by side only because readers searching for one price usually meet the other. For the full sermorelin picture, see what sermorelin costs and sermorelin providers, ranked by what a year costs.

EGRIFTA WR™ and THERA patient support® are trademarks of Theratechnologies Inc. Doseworth is not affiliated with Theratechnologies.