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Lessons from a prior obesity company: what Zafgen taught me about development risk
In late 2005 I founded my first company, an obesity drug developer called Zafgen. This was still long before the highly weight-negative GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic became available. No truly effective drugs for obesity were available at the time, and those that were (like sibutramine and orlistat) had their own challenges with safety and side effects that limited their success. The need for new agent...more
Beyond Activation: Why Building Brown Fat May Succeed Where Waking It Up Failed
Beyond Activation: Why Building Brown Fat May Succeed Where Waking It Up Failed
In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, several large pharmaceutical companies tried to develop obesity drugs that would acutely activate thermogenesis - the body’s process of dissipating energy as heat. The idea was to increase resting metabolic rate and turn stored fat into heat by stimulating the activity ...more
Fabry 101: What is Fabry and what causes it?
By Chris Hopkins, CEO of Glafabra Therapeutics. The author is an employee of Glafabra Therapeutics, which is developing an investigational cell-based therapy for Fabry disease.
Fabry disease is caused by loss of a single lysosomal enzyme, alpha-galactosidase A (α-Gal A), the result of an inherited pathogenic variant in the GLA gene. The absence of this enzyme leads the body to having no way to rem...more
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