Weight-loss start-up emerges from stealth

The soaring demand for antidiabetic and weight-loss drugs has lured in many biotech and big Pharma companies. Onto this crowded field comes a new player from the Bay Area that has emerged from stealth with $65 million in series A financing.

Helicore Biopharma, founded in 2024, secured funds from the investors Versant Ventures, OrbiMed, Longitude Capital, and Wellington Management to clinically test its lead drug candidate, an injectable for weight loss and related conditions. The company anticipates data from its first-in-human studies in the second half of 2025.

Helicore’s lead candidate is in some ways different from the popular weight-loss and antidiabetes medications—peptide-based drugs that work primarily by mimicking the gut hormone glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1)—now on the market. The main ingredients in these drugs target GLP-1 receptors, thereby regulating blood sugar and appetite.

In contrast, Helicore’s lead candidate, HCR-188, is a monoclonal antibody that works as an antagonist to the glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide (GIP), another gut hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. HCR-199 binds to the GIP hormone in a person’s bloodstream, preventing the hormone’s transit into the brain and leading to increased satiety, reduced food consumption, and lower body mass, says Heliocore CEO Gerrit Klaerner.

Klaerner has cofounded other biotechnology companies, including Tricida, a start-up whose kidney drug was denied US Food and Drug Administration approval in 2022; the company filed for bankruptcy the following year.

Klaerner’s other companies enjoyed better success. Relypsa, a company he cofounded in 2007, received FDA approval for the kidney disease drug Veltassa in 2015. Vifor Pharma acquired Relypsa for $1.5 billion the following year. Ilypsa, also focused on kidney disease, was acquired by Amgen in 2007 for $420 million.

Klaerner says several medical conditions that his previous firms concentrated on were downstream of weight-related conditions, so he was excited by the opportunity to lead Helicore.

He explains that one reason for developing an antibody at Helicore was that these proteins stay longer in the blood than other modalities, such as peptides and small molecules.“This means that we can create a drug that patients don’t have to inject every week,” he says.

Helicore’s two other developmental molecules are conjugates of a GLP-1 agonist peptide and a GIP antagonist antibody. “For these drugs, our question was that instead of going after one, how about we go after both the hormones?” Klaerner says. He points out that current weight-loss drugs need to be injected weekly. If successful, the conjugate drugs could reduce that to four injections per year, he says.

MariTide, a monoclonal antibody that Amgen is developing as a weight-loss drug, takes a similar dual approach. It works by activating receptors of the GLP-1 hormone while blocking receptors of the GIP hormone. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly and Company’s weight-loss drug Zepbound activates both receptors.

But Klaerner says a few pivotal differences set the Amgen and Helicore molecules apart. Notably, while Amgen’s molecule targets one of the receptors on the GIP hormone, Helicore’s candidates aim to mop up the GIP hormone from circulation, completely shutting down its further signaling in the brain.

“We must wait for the clinical data to see how our approach works. But that is something that we are quite excited about,” Klaerner says.