Obesity: Arriving After the LeadersThin moat

In obesity, a market its leaders have already built, AbbVie is a latecomer. In 2025 it licensed an amylin-based obesity programme from Gubra, making an upfront payment of $350 million with potential milestones of up to $1.9 billion¹. The leaders in obesity drugs are already selling tens of billions of dollars a year.

The strategy is sensible for a company with AbbVie's commercial reach: amylin drugs are a newer mechanism that could combine with or follow the current GLP-1 medicines. But it means AbbVie is competing against companies that have years of patient data, manufacturing scale and relationships with payers in the category.

The programme is early. It is one of many upfront research deals that together cost AbbVie $4,808 million in 2025².

Obesity is where AbbVie is the challenger rather than the incumbent, the reverse of its position in immunology.

The obesity licence is typical of AbbVie's recent dealmaking: a modest upfront payment for an early asset in a large market, with most of the cost deferred to milestones that are paid only if the drug succeeds. The Gubra deal carries potential milestones of up to $1.9 billion³, more than five times the upfront.

AbbVie's advantage, if the programme works, would be its payer relationships and specialist sales forces. Its disadvantage is that primary care and endocrinology, where most obesity treatment happens, are not markets in which AbbVie has historically led.

The first clinical data for the amylin programme will tell. A drug that shows a meaningful advantage in tolerability or durability would give AbbVie a place in the market; otherwise the $350 million was an option on a race it joined late.