This Unlikely Duo Is Developing a Weight-Loss Pill. Big Pharma Is Obsessed.
The founders of Metsera had Pfizer and Novo Nordisk battling to buy their company. It ‘s their second time striking deal gold.
Pfizer has agreed to acquire Metsera for over $10 billion, a company with eight potential weight-loss drugs.
Metsera’s experimental drug achieved an average weight loss of up to 14.1% beyond placebo after 28 once-weekly doses in a Phase 2b study.
Metsera co-founders Clive Meanwell and Whit Bernard each owned over 12% of shares as of March, potentially netting them over $1 billion apiece.
Long before he found himself in the middle of a multibillion-dollar takeover battle for a coveted new weight-loss drug, Whit Bernard was a music nerd. He spent two years studying the role of musical activity in the nonviolent anti-Soviet uprisings of the Baltic States during the Perestroika era, publishing his research in English and Latvian.
After he got tired of working at a music nonprofit in Brooklyn, N.Y., he went to business school and became a consultant at McKinsey & Co.
His client was Clive Meanwell, a cancer researcher turned pharmaceutical executive who hired McKinsey to shore up costs and make other changes at his biotech Medicines Co.
The two hit it off, and Bernard left McKinsey to become Meanwell’s head of business development. They agreed to sell Medicines to Novartis for almost $10 billion in 2019, and looked to start another company.
Meanwell did what he does best—find the next big thing in medicine by looking for the biggest afflictions facing the most patients. Weight-loss drugs, he bet.
Now, Bernard, 41, and Meanwell, 68, are about to pull off a big sale again.
Pfizer PFE 0.04%increase; green up pointing triangle on Friday said it had agreed to buy Metsera MTSR 2.00%increase; green up pointing triangle in a deal that could be worth more than $10 billion. Metsera’s stable of at least eight potential new drugs promises Pfizer a foothold in a global weight-loss market that analysts project will surpass $100 billion in 2030.
The two stand to profit big from a transaction. Their firm Population Health Partners owns roughly 12% of Metsera shares, which would net it over $1 billion, assuming the final deal values Metsera at $10 billion or more.
“Hundreds of millions of people who need these drugs are not getting anywhere near them,” Meanwell said on a Stat News podcast last month about weight-loss medicines.
Bristol-Myers Squibb held takeover discussions with Metsera before it entered more serious talks with Novo Nordisk NOVO.B -5.13%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Pfizer and eventually reached agreement with Pfizer, The Wall Street Journal has reported. A number of other potential acquirers were interested, too.
Weeks after Pfizer had agreed to buy Metsera, Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, stepped in with a higher offer. Pfizer filed a lawsuit challenging Novo Nordisk’s unsolicited bid on Halloween, prompting Metsera to counter in legal filings that the “Halloween Hail Mary” was “nothing more than a last-ditch attempt to win a bid it did not earn; it is all trick and no treat.” Pfizer prevailed after increasing its bid by 5 cents a share, matching Novo Nordisk’s most recent offer, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Meanwell was born and raised in Louth in the U.K. and went on to study virology at the University of Birmingham. He played sports as a child but was inspired to go into medicine after growing up watching TV comedy “M*A*S*H” about combat doctors in the Korean War.
He landed his dream job at Roche running a cancer-research program in the late 1980s, which later brought him to the U.S. for work in California. Meanwell started to realize he was most interested in going beyond research and bringing new drugs to patients.
Bernard was born in Connecticut and raised in Baltimore. He majored in music at Brown University and was into classical and jazz. He studied on a Fulbright scholarship in Latvia in 2007 and 2008.
After Brown, he led a contemporary music nonprofit in Brooklyn. Bernard then decided to go back to school to get his master’s degree in business at Northwestern University, which landed him a job at McKinsey as a consultant.
Soon Meanwell was one of his clients.
Meanwell founded Medicines Co. in 1997, with a focus on acquiring late-stage drug candidates that other companies didn’t want. These included drugs for pain and heart diseases.
Medicines partnered with large biotech Biogen on the blood-thinner drug Angiomax. For many years, the company generated modest sales. Then a decade ago, it began to sell off most of its older drugs to focus on one promising opportunity in a cholesterol drug.
The drug was the kind of medicine that Meanwell and Bernard liked to target. It was based on a technology that had matured, after years of research. And it promised to help tens of thousands of patients whose cholesterol wasn’t well controlled by older statin pills.
Medicines partnered with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals on the drug, which became known as Leqvio.
Novartis agreed to buy Medicines for $9.7 billion in 2019, a year when Medicines’s stock price had nearly quadrupled on positive data for the testing of the cholesterol drug.
Meanwell and Bernard began hunting for their next big project. The pharmaceutical industry was obsessed with rare diseases, which they theorized left room for new drugs treating the most-common ones. To identify big needs, the pair started Population Health Partners, a firm that invests in businesses tied to the top-10 things that “drive death and destruction” among the population today.
Near the top of its list: obesity.
A whopping 40% of adults in the U.S. are obese. The condition raises their risk for other diseases like diabetes and stroke. It is a huge public health threat. Patients had few options, before companies like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly developed so-called GLP-1 drugs.
The injections largely mimic appetite-suppressing hormones, including GLP-1, in a person’s gut. Studies showed patients taking the medicines lost significant amounts of weight.
Meanwell has said he saw a unique opportunity for obesity treatment around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic—which put a spotlight on the pharmaceutical industry—as results from new weight-loss drug candidates began stunning industry watchers. He started to canvas pharmaceutical companies about working together on a new weight-loss venture.
“We went around to all the big pharma companies, saying, ‘We can bring capital, we can bring teams, we can prompt you into taking a direction you may not have done lately,’” Meanwell said in an interview with Fast Company last year.
One of the companies was Pfizer, people familiar with the matter said. Meanwell was attracted to the anti-obesity pills that Pfizer was researching, because pills are much easier for patients to take and can command even higher sales. Talks with Pfizer and other big pharma companies fizzled out, though, after the potential partners opted to hold onto their assets.
Meanwell and Bernard did a series of deals to round up assets, including a 2023 purchase of the U.K.-based diabetes and obesity biotech Zihipp. They worked alongside Metsera’s other two co-founders—Paul Berns and Chris Visioli. Berns is a managing director at ARCH Venture Partners, Metsera’s biggest backer, and Visioli had been chief financial officer at Medicines.
ARCH made its first seed investment in Metsera in 2021 to help get the business off the ground, and Berns began helping Meanwell and Bernard plot out their vision, including traveling to the U.K. to meet with Zihipp.
Zihipp had been spun out of research into naturally occurring substances called peptides at Imperial College London that furnished discoveries into how to induce weight loss. Zihipp Chair Stephen Bloom, who led the academic lab conducting the peptide research, serves as senior vice president of research and development for Metsera today.
Drugs based on Zihipp technology held the promise of improving upon older GLP-1 drugs, for instance by allowing less frequent dosing.
Under Meanwell and Bernard, Metsera tested Zihipp’s experimental drugs, including an injection that could be taken monthly, rather than weekly like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, the leading weight-loss drugs.
In a Phase 2b study in nearly 240 people, one of its experimental drugs triggered average weight loss of up to 14.1% beyond what those on a placebo achieved after 28 once-weekly doses, Metsera said in September.
Metsera is testing whether giving the same drug once a month can achieve significant weight loss, and plans to release results from more studies by the end of this year.
Metsera’s drug pipeline could reach over $5 billion in peak annual revenue, Leerink Partners analysts estimate.