Obesity drug discovery still starts in animal studies and that matters
Posted by reid_f in Research & News - 2 points, 2 comments.
This one from drug target review is basically saying the next wave of glp-1 style drugs is gonna come from earlier stage research, the kind done in mice and cells before any human trials. They point to around 20 billion in private funding going into metabolic disease programs in the first half of 2025, which is wild when you think about it.
My take is that the press loves to talk about the finished product, the injection, the weight loss number, but the real work is still happening in petri dishes and rat cages. That part rarely makes the news. I think a lot of people on this board forget that the compounds they read about started here, with some researcher poking at receptors nobody cared about yet.
What i keep wondering is whether all that early money is actually going into novel mechanisms, or if it's just more me-too glp-1 stuff with a fresh coat of paint. Anyone following the preclinical space closely enough to say?
Comments
- quiet_ironman: Honestly the me-too thing is my worry too. That 20 billion sounds huge till you realize half of it is probably going to "next gen glp-1" that does almost the same thing with a different half-life. The receptor science is where it gets interesting to me, like what's coming after the incretin angle, amylin pathways, mitochondrial stuff, things that actually work differently. If someone here is tracking preclinical papers, id love to know what's catching their eye 🔬
- reid_f: Yeah that's exactly the tension, the money looks massive on paper but a lot of it is just reformulation work, longer half life, oral versions, better tolerability, which is fine but it's not the same as finding something that actually works through a different mechanism. The amylin side is interesting to me too, i've been keeping an eye on the cagrilintide style stuff and what comes after it, but i honestly haven't dug deep into preclinical papers lately so i can't point to anything specific. I'
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