Next up in obesity therapeutics

The attention of mainstream and social media on the latest obesity therapies has fueled sales and put a spotlight on an indication with a market potential north of 750 million patients. Rather than trigger a wave of innovation in biotech, the pipeline of therapies behind first-in-class GLP-1 agonist Wegovy is dominated by large pharma and, so far, remains centered on the GLP-1 paradigm.

What industry’s obesity pipeline lacks is target diversity. The majority of late-stage programs target GLP-1 with the hope of achieving greater efficacy by combining the mechanism with additional incretin-based hormonal peptides. Like Wegovy semaglutide, most of these therapies are delivered via subcutaneous injection. ...