STAT+: A pill that mimics exercise? Early results on drug designed to maintain both weight loss and muscle mass

If you could design an oral treatment that limits appetite and mimics some effects of physical activity, you might call it exercise in a pill. Now a company is releasing early results for a compound to do just that.

The pill, the company hopes, can maintain weight loss without the common gastrointestinal effects of GLP-1s. The component of exercise it is designed to re-create is preservation of lean muscle mass, a concern when people yo-yo on and off GLP-1 drugs, losing more muscle each time.

Enveda, a 5-year-old biotech based in Boulder, Colo., announced Phase 1 results in a press release Tuesday for an oral drug candidate that imitates lactate phenylalanine (lac-phe for short), a small molecule metabolite discovered by Stanford scientists. Those researchers showed in a 2022 Nature paper that lac-phe can suppress appetite and lower obesity in animals. Lac-phe and ENV-308, Enveda’s chemically engineered version, both act on leptin, a hormone that has been the target of scientists and drug developers for decades. If confirmed in clinical trials, the company says, ENV-308 would be the first “leptin sensitizer in a pill.” 

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