Helping People Lose Weight and Live Healthy: Ron Renaud on The Long Run

Ron Renaud is today’s guest on The Long Run. He is the CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Kailera Therapeutics.

Kailera is pursuing what could be the biggest opportunity in pharmaceutical industry history.

It’s developing a portfolio of GLP-1-based drugs for obesity. Drugs in this category have been around a long time for treatment of Type 2 diabetes, but over the last few years demand has skyrocketed. That’s because evidence has been mounting that these drugs are effective at helping all kinds of people – not just diabetics — to lose significant weight and lower their risk for a bunch of chronic ailments that stem from obesity, like cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease.

More than 1 billion people worldwide are considered obese. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are the category leaders, and their success has inspired an estimated 80 different drugs and drug combinations sprinting ahead in clinical development. Dozens of public and private companies are striving to capture a piece of a market. Some analysts estimate it will be worth more than $150 billion a year in sales by the early 2030s.

Kailera is one of the well-funded and aggressive entrants in the category. It has raised $1 billion in a pair of venture capital rounds. The money is being used to advance a portfolio of injectable and oral drug candidates from China-based Jiagsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. Kailera is now running a series of global Phase III clinical trials with a lead candidate that seeks to compete with Eli Lilly’s blockbuster tirzepatide, marketed as Zepbound for obesity.

Ron has a long and diversified track record of success in biotech. He was previously CEO of a hepatitis C drug developer acquired by Merck, a messenger RNA therapeutics developer acquired by Sanofi, and a neuroscience drug developer acquired by AbbVie.

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Please enjoy this conversation with Ron Renaud on The Long Run.