British firms hungry to join booming anti-obesity market

Last week it became clear why: in trials, one of Metsera’s injectable drugs had been shown to help people lose 14.1% of their bodyweight in 28 weeks. For comparison, the ingredient in popular drug Wegovy, semaglutide, has a typical weight loss over 68 weeks of 12-15%.

Metsera’s success is a sign of the UK’s growth as a consumer and an early-stage developer of obesity drugs. Its new drug is based on a “library” of gut proteins developed by London startup Zihipp, founded by the British obesity pioneer Stephen Bloom, which Metsera bought two years earlier.

About a quarter of UK adults are obese, and 36% are overweight; one estimate suggests 1.5 million people are using injectable GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro to combat this. Between last October and March, that number grew by 25% a month. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said last week that giving weight-loss jabs to millions of NHS patients would help “finally defeat obesity”.

Figures by PitchBook show global investments in obesity startups rose to $1.3bn in 2024, up more than 90% on the year before. In the UK, these investments include the £2.7m buyout of the drug development company Chronos Therapeutics in April 2024, and the £10m buyout of ABL Health, a healthcare services provider, two months later.

In January, Verdiva Bio, a company developing a game-changing GLP-1 pill, burst on to the scene with a $411m funding round – becoming one of the UK’s first “obesity unicorns” in the process. Its CEO Khurem Farooq said the UK’s “world-leading research institutions and innovation ecosystem” made it attractive. “There are great early-stage life-science investors and sources of funding,” he said. “The UK is also home to a number of world-renowned leaders in the obesity and cardiometabolic space.”

Zihipp was one of a raft of British startups pioneering obesity drugs and treatments. Now, many of those are poised to be global leaders in a market which some analysts believe could be worth $100bn by 2030 – if the government creates the right conditions.

And it’s not just GLP-1s that UK startups are focused on – it’s lifestyle, too. Research has shown that those who stop taking the drugs return to their original weight within a year. How do you help those people keep the weight off? Several UK-based companies are looking for answers.

Manual, which started life providing erectile dysfunction and hair-loss treatments, has expanded into direct-to-consumer weight-loss treatments and raised $38.5m in September 2024. Will Gibbs, a partner at Octopus Ventures and one of its investors, said the company will “support you with changing your eating habits, meal habits, diet. It’s asking, how do we embed this as a change, rather than just giving you a drug.” A British rival, Numan Health, raised $57m in July.

Startups are looking to the UK because changes to tariffs, pressure to manufacture domestically, criticism of academic and scientific institutions and false claims over GLP-1 drugs from health secretary Robert Kennedy, make the US a less attractive proposition.

“Some people I speak to are seeing a lot of professors looking to come to the UK, said Colin Terry, life sciences partner at Deloitte. Diederik Stadig, senior economist in healthcare at ING, adds: “Grants in the US are being cut. That provides an opportunity for future innovation” in the UK.

At an investment summit last October, the government announced a £279m partnership with the pharma giant Lilly to tackle obesity, including a biotech hub where startups could benefit from Lilly’s expertise. But a year on, and despite the government announcing an £85m programme, part-funded by Lilly, there is no sign of the hub. “Lilly is not yet in a position to finalise our investment,” the company said. “We are awaiting more clarity around the UK life sciences environment.”

It didn’t say which aspect of the environment, but in recent weeks pharma companies have shown their displeasure at the UK’s decline in drug spending. Last month, Merck halted a £1bn research centre in King’s Cross, London, and AstraZeneca, the LSE’s second-largest company, upgraded its listing in New York and put a £200m lab in Cambridge on hold.

The message to the UK government from obesity startups is simple: with the US pharmaceuticals having dominated for so long, it must introduce pricing and regulation that makes it an attractive place to develop these drugs. “It is time for Europe and the UK to work out what a successful strategy could be to enable that innovation outside the US,” says Terry.

A government spokesperson said: “New ways of accessing support to tackle obesity could be transformational for society. That’s why we’re inviting proposals to test innovative ways of improving obesity patients’ health.”

Photograph by Getty Images