The Next Obesity Breakthrough Could Be Written in Code

Eli Lilly partners with Superluminal to tap Al for faster obesity drug discovery beyond injectables.

14 Aug 2025

Eli Lilly, the maker of Zepbound, has struck a deal worth up to $1.3bn with Superluminal, a biotech start-up, to accelerate the hunt for new obesity and cardiometabolic drugs. The arrangement, announced in August, grants Lilly exclusive access to Superluminal's artificial intelligence platform. The goal is to compress years of traditional laboratory work into months.

The wager comes as slimming injections have become the hottest products in modern medicine. Analysts expect the obesity-drug market to swell past $150bn by the early 2030s, with Lilly and Novo Nordisk locked in a contest for supremacy. Al offers a possible edge: the chance to design novel compounds more quickly, and perhaps shift away from cumbersome injections toward oral pills. Such alternatives would ease supply bottlenecks and lower barriers for patients.

Superluminal's existing drug programme, a candidate targeting MC4R mutations that cause rare genetic obesity, remains outside the deal and will move into human trials next year. Instead, the partnership will explore other molecules, guided by algorithms trained to spot chemical patterns invisible to humans. Lilly is betting that this could broaden the therapeutic arsenal beyond today's injectables.

The industry is abuzz with such efforts. Algorithms are being trained on vast troves of chemical data, promising to identify hits more efficiently. Proponents say this could shave years off development timelines. Skeptics counter that Al tools have yet to deliver results at commercial scale. "It is still an experiment," notes one veteran of drug discovery. Lilly's decision to risk over a billion dollars nonetheless suggests that big pharma is convinced the experiment is worth running.

The broader context is sobering. Obesity fuels diabetes, liver disease and cardiovascular illness, among the largest drains on health systems worldwide. Novo Nordisk is busy expanding Wegovy into new indications. Lilly, rather than chase indication by indication, is signalling faith in next-generation tools to generate an entirely new wave of therapies.

The hurdles remain formidable: clinical trials, regulatory scrutiny and questions over long-term efficacy. But the trajectory is unmistakable. The future of obesity treatment may be determined as much by algorithms as by chemists in white coats.