Submitted by D.P. Juan on Mon, 24/11/2025 - 15:54
The Florian T. Merkle group at the Department of Pharmacology recently received funding to help launch an anti-obesity drug development spin-out company. The global obesity pandemic is a leading preventable cause of death, and the anti-obesity drug market is growing exponentially and is predicted to be worth ~$100 billion by the end of the decade. Revolutionary anti-obesity drugs like semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) act in the brain to suppress appetite but have room for improvement.
To develop the next generation of anti-obesity drugs, the Merkle group developed a human cellular platform of appetite-regulatory neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) Not only do these iPSC-derived human neurons respond to semaglutide and other known drugs and hormones, their team have used this model to discover new drugs that activate neurons in culture and potently reduce body weight in mice.
Since this cellular system has tremendous potential to discover new targets for anti-obesity drug development, the team has recently been awarded both a “Golden Ticket” award from Ozempic producer Novo Nordisk, and funding from Cambridge Enterprise to support the development of our spinout, which is supported by an all-star team of scientific and business advisors and is poised for explosive growth. Their group is seeking a talented and energetic postdoc (details at https://bit.ly/47F9udd) to help scale up their discovery pipelines and prioritise top leads for future drug development with in vitro and in vivo phenotyping.
More info on how the Department supports and encourages entrepreneurship can be found on our entrepreneurship funding: https://lnkd.in/eSxAVtZh