Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, January 13th.

Today on Forbes, how a Wall Street analyst started a $4 billion obesity drug company.

Brian Leanne had been working as a Wall Street analyst for nearly a decade when he took a meeting that changed his life.

It was 2012, and he'd been

following small and mid-cap biotech firms that were working on drugs for metabolic diseases.

But after a meeting with some pharma execs, who mentioned their company was open to licensing

some recently acquired diabetes drug candidates, he decided to ditch his Wall Street career to strike a deal.

Leanne, now 60 years old, had never launched a business before, but he convinced the company,

Leganne Pharmaceuticals, to not only license five drugs, but also to invest $2.5 million in his new

startup to kick off its operations.

Today, his company, San Diego-based Viking Therapeutics, is a $4 billion market-cap publicly traded

drug developer with prime drug candidates in the booming obesity space.

While it is continuing to work on metabolic disorders like fatty liver disease,

the key therapy in its pipeline is a next-gen GLP1 drug for obesity that's now in clinical

trials as both an injection, currently in phase three studies, and a pill, phase two.

Ever since Novo-Nordesk launched OZempic for diabetes in 2017,

GLP-1s have taken America by storm. Led by pharmaceutical giants, Novo, which makes

Wegovi for weight loss, and recently got approval for its pill version, and Eli Lilly, which

has Zepbound, the market for these weight loss drugs

is expected to reach $100 billion in sales by 2030. After all, some 40% of American adults

are obese, which means potentially there's more than 100 million people in the U.S. alone

who could medically qualify for these drugs.

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