Brian Lian 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 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.

Lian, now 60, had never launched a business before. But he convinced the company, Ligand 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 GLP-1 drug for obesity that's now in clinical trials as both an injection (currently in phase 3 studies) and a pill (phase 2).

Ever since Novo Nordisk launched Ozempic for diabetes in 2017, GLP-1s have taken America by storm. Led by pharmaceutical giants Novo (which makes Wegovy 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. Research is ongoing about their potential benefits in other related conditions too, including cardiovascular disease.

“We can’t operate as if we’re going to be acquired. We have to run the business.”

Given the size of the opportunity, the competition is fierce. In fall 2025, another publicly traded obesity drug upstart called

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