The race is on to turn your body into a GLP

Abdul Alhamood and Bill Monahan in the lab at Fractyl Health, a biotech start up working to develop gene therapy for obesity. Courtesy Fractyl Health

People looking to lose weight and lower their blood sugar may someday be able to get a single injection that turns their cells into tiny factories churning out a protein that is essentially the active ingredient in drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro.

That’s the ambition of two biotech startups, New York-based RenBio and Fractyl Health in Massachusetts. Both companies have completed initial tests showing that their approaches work, at least in mice, and both have started tests in larger animals — pigs and monkeys — to see whether their gene therapies can work in larger animals.

With continued success and enough funding, the