Aard­vark nabs $85M to tar­get hunger, not ap­petite, as it eyes 2026 NDA fil­ing

A small San Diego biotech wants to take a dif­fer­ent ap­proach to the weight loss drug R&D field by go­ing af­ter hunger rather than sup­press­ing ap­petite like the wild­ly pop­u­lar GLP-1 class.

“Most folks will con­cep­tu­al­ize ap­petite and hunger as, ‘Aren’t they just dif­fer­ent ex­tremes along the same con­tin­u­um?’” Aard­vark Ther­a­peu­tics CEO Tien Lee told End­points News. “But they’re ac­tu­al­ly two dif­fer­ent neu­ro­log­ic dri­ves.”

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