- CEO Clive Meanwell
- Total raised $290 million
- Headquarters New York, NY
Shortly after Clive Meanwell sold The Medicines Company to Novartis for nearly $10 billion in 2020, he started a life sciences investment firm focused on large global health issues.
Obesity was an obvious global health target despite its unpopularity after decades of failure. His new firm, Population Health Partners, was on the brink of carving out an obesity pipeline from a large pharma. But then Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly sparked a renaissance in the field, and the pharma company backed out at the last minute, Meanwell said.
“Shareholders were so happy with [Lilly and Novo] it became clear that, for that big pharmaceutical company, it wasn’t a smart thing for them to give their assets to us,” he said.
So they went shopping elsewhere with the help of ARCH managing director Kristina Burow. They compiled a list of more than 200 companies.
At the top was a UK startup called Zihipp, which had a library of 20,000 peptides, or a “Lego kit for weight loss and diabetes” and a toehold in the clinic, Meanwell said. Its founder, Sir Stephen Bloom, had been a key researcher in the field for decades. Second on the list was South Korea-based D&D Pharmatech, which was working to make orally available peptide drugs.
Meanwell and Burow went after both, founding Metsera while acquiring Zihipp and licensing assets from D&D. With $290 million in funding, Metsera is now focused on bringing a few peptides through early clinical testing and getting the data to show whether they had something to offer at this stage in the wildly competitive anti-obesity landscape.
“Time is of the essence,” said Bloom, who’s now senior vice president of R&D at Metsera. “We are saving lives with these agents. People are living longer. It’s really important to get on with it. You’ve got to realize that people will be dying while you’re going through the bureaucracy.”
While many drugmakers, Novo and Lilly included, are looking beyond GLP-1s for their next generation of medicines, Meanwell thinks the GLP-1 drugs and other peptides will continue to be the “backbone” for patients.
Thus, Metsera’s lead program is an injectable GLP-1, not unlike Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound. But Metsera thinks it has an edge with monthly dosing, rather than cumbersome weekly shots. That could also make the manufacturing point “moot,” Meanwell said, because having potent and less-frequent dosing means they need fewer factories. Lilly and Novo have spent billions rehabbing, building and buying manufacturing plants to keep up with demand.
The startup also has a GLP-1 agonist combined with a dual amylin/calcitonin receptor agonist agent, a “triple G” asset (GLP-1, GIP and glucagon), and plans for a four-drug combination. It also has multiple oral medicines in the works.
There are no human data yet on the startup’s oral programs, and Bloom raised doubts about how much of a priority they’ll be. Will people take daily tablets if a monthly injectable is an option? “There’s no question at all that the tablets are an effing nuisance,” Bloom said of daily tablets that he takes for various health reasons.
More broadly, Bloom wants to address a few key areas: side effects that cause people to stop taking current obesity drugs; curbing the return of diabetes; and dosing less often — which could reduce costs and make the drugs more accessible.
If early clinical data bear fruit in obesity, Meanwell said Metsera will move quickly to expand into outcomes trials in conditions like cardiovascular, sleep apnea, osteoporosis, heart failure and other areas where Novo and Lilly have made headway.
Those targets could necessitate 50,000 patients in clinical trials — an amount that Meanwell acknowledged as “terribly daunting.” But they’ve done it before. At The Medicines Company, the team randomized 92,000 patients for large outcomes trials. And Metsera thinks it can do it more efficiently than the current industry rate of $50,000 to $100,000 per clinical trial participant.
And Metsera will keep shopping for assets. The list of 200 companies keeps growing, Meanwell said.
Key backers: Population Health Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, GV, F-Prime Capital, Mubadala Capital, Newpath Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Find the full list of 2024 Endpoints 11 winners here.