STAT+: A pill that mimics exercise? Early results on drug designed to maintain both weight loss and muscle mass
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- Enveda, a 5-year-old Boulder, Colo. biotech, announced Phase 1 results Tuesday for ENV-308, an oral drug candidate designed to maintain weight loss while preserving lean muscle mass and avoiding the gastrointestinal side effects common to GLP-1 drugs.
- ENV-308 is a chemically engineered version of lac-phe (lactate phenylalanine), a small molecule metabolite discovered by Stanford scientists and shown in a 2022 Nature paper to suppress appetite and reduce obesity in animals.
- Both lac-phe and ENV-308 act on leptin, a hormone drug developers have pursued for decades but never successfully targeted in pill form.
- Enveda says that if Phase 1 results are confirmed in further clinical trials, ENV-308 would become the first 'leptin sensitizer in a pill.'
- The drug's design specifically addresses lean muscle loss during weight cycling on and off GLP-1s, where users lose additional muscle each time they yo-yo.
Why it matters: If Phase 1 results hold, ENV-308 would be the first oral leptin sensitizer — a hormone drug developers have chased for decades — while sidestepping the gastrointestinal side effects and muscle loss that plague GLP-1 drugs. Enveda's 5-year-old biotech is targeting the obesity market with a mechanism no pill has achieved.
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