Viking's VK2735 Moves Most Patients Down a BMI Class

Viking Therapeutics put new numbers on its obesity drug VK2735 at ObesityWeek 2026 in Washington, D.C., and the headline figure is about categories, not kilograms. In an exploratory analysis of the company's Phase 2 VENTURE trial, 74 percent of participants receiving weekly subcutaneous VK2735 improved by at least one body mass index category after 13 weeks. Fifteen percent of participants on placebo did the same, and no participant on the drug moved up a category.

VK2735 is a dual agonist of two gut hormone receptors, GLP-1 and GIP, the same receptor pair targeted by Eli Lilly's tirzepatide. Viking is developing it in two forms: a weekly injection and an oral tablet. The VENTURE analysis also found improvements across multiple cardiometabolic markers, the company said, though the poster summary doesn't publish the marker-by-marker values alongside the BMI figures.

The poster was presented on Sunday, November 15, by Harold Bays, medical director and president of the Louisville Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center in Kentucky. ObesityWeek, the annual meeting of The Obesity Society, runs November 14 to 17. A second Viking poster at the meeting covers baseline characteristics of participants in VANQUISH-2, one of the drug's two ongoing Phase 3 trials, which enrolls adults with overweight or obesity who also have type 2 diabetes.

Readers should hold the 74 percent figure at the right distance. It's an exploratory analysis of a Phase 2 trial, presented as a conference poster and reported by the company that sells the drug's future. Exploratory analyses look for patterns after a trial's main questions are set, and they don't carry the statistical weight of a prespecified primary endpoint. Thirteen weeks is also short for a medicine patients would take for years, and the summary doesn't give the trial's dropout or side-effect rates for this cut of the data.

The Phase 3 program is where the claim gets tested properly. Viking started the VANQUISH program in June 2025 with two trials: VANQUISH-1 in adults with obesity and VANQUISH-2 in adults with overweight or obesity and type 2 diabetes. The company expects the studies to complete in 2027. VK2735 isn't approved anywhere, and it can't be prescribed or sold while those trials run.

The competitive context explains why a poster draws attention. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly already sell GLP-1 medicines, Novo used the same meeting to present post hoc analyses of its next combination drug CagriSema, and Lilly presented new data on its own pipeline. A BMI-category shift is a measure patients understand in a way a percentage doesn't: it's the difference between a chart that reads obese and one that reads overweight. Whether VK2735 delivers that shift at Phase 3 scale, with tolerable side effects over a year or more, is the question the VANQUISH readouts will answer.

One more caution belongs on the record. Viking's release doesn't publish the number of participants in this analysis next to the percentages, and a 74 percent share of a small Phase 2 subgroup can move fast when a few patients change category. The company also doesn't break out how many participants crossed from obesity into overweight versus from overweight into the normal range, and those crossings don't mean the same thing clinically. The VANQUISH trials, with larger enrollments and longer follow-up, will put denominators under every one of these figures.