Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals unveiled a new RNAi-based obesity program on Wednesday that it believes could be “gentler” than currently available GLP-1 products.
The target, ALK7, is a receptor on the surface of fat-storing cells called adipocytes. Arrowhead’s ARO-ALK7 essentially works by blocking messages that tell adipocytes to store fat. The company wants to take that candidate and its previously announced obesity program ARO-INHBE into the clinic in early 2025. ARO-INHBE goes after a different target in the same pathway as ARO-ALK7.
“There’s a lot of room in this market,” head of investor relations Vincent Anzalone told Endpoints News on Wednesday. “There will be lots of winners here. We’ve only seen one class of winners so far.”
The race to join Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s obesity blockbusters is becoming increasingly crowded, with multiple companies reporting promising mid-stage and early results, and large drugmakers like AstraZeneca and Roche announcing ambitious plans.
James HamiltonArrowhead will look at its two early-stage candidates as monotherapies and in combination with a GLP-1. If used in combination, that may allow patients to take a lower dose of GLP-1, according to Arrowhead’s chief of discovery and translational medicine James Hamilton. If used as a monotherapy, the RNAi candidates could be a “kinder, gentler” treatment than GLP-1 rivals, he said.
“You might lose a little less weight, but you probably would not lose lean mass, and may not have the GI side effects that the GLP-1s have,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said future data will determine whether Arrowhead continues to pursue both programs independently.
“It’s possible that we would choose one at some point, or it’s possible that we would partner one at some point and keep the other,” Hamilton said. “We need to run the studies and see what the results show before we make a call.”