Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals (ARWR) added ~12% in the premarket on Tuesday after the company said that its experimental obesity therapy ARO-INHBE doubled weight loss in an early-stage trial in combination with Eli Lilly’s (LLY) blockbuster GLP-1 drug, tirzepatide, marketed as Zepbound.
In a Phase 1/2a trial for obese adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus, ARO-INHBE with tirzepatide led to 9.4% of weight loss over 16 weeks, compared to 4.8% of weight loss generated by tirzepatide alone, the Pasadena, California-based biotech said.
Additionally, ARO-INHBE, which is designed to target a gene associated with lower fat distribution, led to a nearly threefold improvement in visceral fat, total fat, and liver fat compared to tirzepatide alone.
Regarding safety, the company stated that ARO-INHBE was generally well tolerated, with the majority of treatment-emergent adverse events being mild in severity. Both groups of patients who received tirzepatide as a single agent and with ARO-INHBE demonstrated similar rates of gastrointestinal adverse events.
Additionally, Arrowhead (ARWR) posted interim data from a Phase 1/2 clinical trial for another obesity candidate called ARO-ALK7, noting that the RNA interference therapeutic, after a single dose, led to a placebo-adjusted 14.1% average reduction in visceral fat over eight weeks.
There were no notable adverse lab findings, including those related to liver enzymes, and the experimental therapy was generally well-tolerated, Arrowhead (ARWR) added.
The dose-escalating trials, named AROINHBE-1001 and AROALK7-1001, had enrolled up to 78 and 90 adult volunteers with obesity, respectively.