When the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk wanted to test whether the main ingredient in Ozempic, its wildly popular weight-loss and diabetes drug, could also treat liver disease, it first needed approval from an ethics panel to ensure the safety of trial volunteers in the United States.

Such panels, called institutional review boards, have the power to reject drug trials or order modifications if participants face unreasonable risks. They are supposed to be independent watchdogs — counterweights to Big Pharma and overzealous researchers.

Yet Novo didn’t have to venture far to hire an ethics panel for its liver-disease trial in May 2024: It chose WCG Clinical, a review board partly owned by its own corporate parent, The New York Times found.

Novo declines to discuss the review boards it selects; their names are scrubbed from a federal online database, because the information is deemed proprietary. But documents obtained by The Times reveal that the liver study was hardly an outlier: In the six years since its parent company invested in the private-equity-controlled panel, Novo has selected WCG to review at least 46 trials, a sharp increase over previous years.

Most of those trials grew out of Novo’s efforts to find new uses — and markets — for semaglutide, the primary ingredient in Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus, the company’s top-selling drugs for diabetes or obesity.