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Shaping the future of cardiometabolic innovation: advances and opportunities

Obesity is a global public health concern closely linked to cardiometabolic complications. This Comment provides our views on recent breakthroughs, emerging innovations and future needs of therapeutic interventions to counteract obesity and its associated health risks.

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Fig. 1: Current and next-generation therapeutics for cardiometabolic diseases.

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Acknowledgements

This Comment emerged from discussions with key industrial, biotechnology and academic opinion leaders at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basal Metabolic Research Innovation Summit on Cardiometabolic Health held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2024. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research is an independent research centre, based at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is partially funded by an unconditional donation from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF23SA0084103).

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All authors conceptualized the manuscript. C.C. led and drafted the manuscript. All authors provided critical feedback and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Christoffer Clemmensen.

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Competing interests

C.C. is a co-founder of Ousia Pharma, a biotechnology company developing therapeutics for the treatment of obesity. T.W.S. and Z.G.-H. are co-founders of Embark Laboratories and Incipiam Pharma, companies developing therapeutics for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity. The remaining authors declare no competing interest.

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Nature Metabolism thanks Richard DiMarchi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Clemmensen, C., Gerhart-Hines, Z., Schwartz, T.W. et al. Shaping the future of cardiometabolic innovation: advances and opportunities. Nat Metab 7, 1495–1497 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-025-01343-5

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