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“Initial weight loss is just the first chapter,” said Mia de Graaf, Deputy Executive Health Editor at Business Insider, “but the real challenge and opportunity is maintaining it.”
De Graaf moderated a panel at the 2025 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) International Convention that explored weight loss and longevity, and how metabolic drugs are disrupting chronic diseases like obesity. Scientists and drug developers are working to improve in areas like durability, tolerability, and the quality of weight loss (as well as preventing too much loss of muscle mass). And researchers are setting new targets to investigate and grow the benefits of these kinds of drugs to help patients not only lose weight, but also live longer, healthier lives.
Bio.News interview with Maha Radhakrishnan, M.D., Executive Partner at Private Equity Sofinnova Investments, at BIO 2025 in Boston
The next frontier of weight loss medicine
“These are wonder drugs, really,” said Kristen Fortney, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder of BioAge Labs. “But they’re also some of the first few targets that we’ve tried in this space. And there seems to be a really rich set of other targets that can be added to an anchor, to backbone, and to confer other benefits.”
Researchers are interested in muscle health in particular, she noted. Some companies are focusing efforts on muscle-related weight loss drugs, especially when it comes to older patient populations.
“When they lose weight for any reason,” she said, “they tend to lose too much muscle. And then, if they get off the drug because they can’t tolerate it, and they regain weight because they’re older, they also tend to gain too much fat—more so than a younger person. You can imagine what those kinds of cycles could do to your body.”
Some developers, like Ashley Zehnder, DVM, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO at Fauna Bio, are looking to the natural world to solve this problem by investigating how animals that are naturally either disease-resistant or able to repair diseases.
“We work with a lot of hibernating mammals,” she said. “These are animals that, in the context of our panel today, are able to double their body weight and live off that body fat during a six-month period of hibernation, and massively increase their energy expenditure during hibernation. They also are able to preserve skeletal muscle, even though they’re not moving for about six months out of the year.”
As Maha Radhakrishnan, M.D., Executive Partner at Private Equity Sofinnova Investments, explained, the body is a system, and weight is often tied to heart health, kidney health, brain health, and more.
“There’s going to be a huge focus on weight loss medications,” she said, “but on the maintenance side, I think they will have to prove their worth.”
A partnership for muscle-related weight loss drugs
As the world learned quickly after GLP-1s came to market, the loss of muscle mass, along with fat, was a downside of the drug for many patients. Now, companies like Eli Lilly and Regeneron, among others, are targeting proteins tied to muscle preservation or growth.
“I think it’s really important to consider the quality of body composition with weight,” said Hanadie Yousef, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder of Juvena Therapeutics. “Juvena just entered a discovery collaboration with Lily where we’re really focused on identifying novel proteins and their targets that can improve overall muscle health as well as improve body composition in regards to sustained healthy weight loss with improvements and actually increases in metabolism versus versus the idea of slowing down your metabolism through a starvation related mechanism.”
The future of longevity
It is important for both patients and prescribers to remember that these drugs are really intended for patients who need assistance in losing weight in order to improve their health, as opposed to being a celebrity-style diet plan. And this will be even more important to remember as oral medication options emerge.
“When we think about the future of the obesity space, there are a couple things that come to mind,” said Fortney. “One is that we really think a lot about oral medicines for cost reasons. First and foremost, people sometimes need to take these drugs for not just a year, but really for the rest of their lives. Biologics are so expensive, so small molecules are really exciting.”
It’s also important to remember that genetics can play a role, said Greg Wiederrecht, Managing Director, Healthcare Investment Banking at Royal Bank of Canada. “We’re not all obese for the same reasons.”
“I think there’s going to be better understanding of certain types of obesity and comorbidities that certain folks may or may not have,” said Yousef. “I think we’ll see more specific medications that are really targeting your biology and aging because folks age differently, and they have different drivers of age-related diseases.”
As Zehnder pointed out, we haven’t quite cracked the nut on weight loss and aging.
“Even five or six years ago, people thought this was a graveyard indication, and then we proved that it’s not,” she said. “It’s opened up pharma’s appetites for other graveyard indications, like some of the kinds of heart failure that don’t have effective therapies.”
