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Enticed by the immense market opened by GLP-1 weight loss drugs Wegovy and Zepbound, a handful of biotech companies are trying to develop next-generation, longer-lasting therapies based on a very different approach: RNA interference.

This Nobel Prize-winning science works by degrading the biological blueprints that RNA use to make proteins — without the genetic instructions, the troublesome proteins are never made and the gene is essentially muted.

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If the companies succeed, it would be a significant shift in the obesity treatment revolution, away from weekly drugs targeting hormones to medications that could be given much less frequently — twice a year or even less — and pinpoint genetic contributors to weight.

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