Enomania, a small Italian restaurant in Frederiksberg, a leafy residential area on the outskirts of Copenhagen, is Adam Steensberg’s favourite eatery.
The chief executive of Zealand Pharma, a clinical-stage weight-loss drugs company, has cycled the ten minutes from his home for our Friday lunch.
The restaurant’s website proudly cites the quote: “We live to eat and do not eat to live.”
Sitting down in one of the restaurant’s warren of rooms, Steensberg, 50, leader of one of the world’s most promising anti-obesity biotech companies, says such sentiment is not the root of what he calls “the biggest health care challenge of our time”.
“Part of the problem is what people eat. In the society we live in, you’re so exposed to processed food all the time.”
He adds: “It’s actually quite difficult to become obese by eating a cuisine like this one.”
Steensberg recommends the risotto — which the proprietor Damiano Alberti “is known for” — with leek and braised veal breast. For starters we order chitarrine with fish ragu, saffron, courgette and black olives.
He also chooses a burgundy to accompany our lunch, Chambolle-Musigny 2018. “I would be crying all afternoon if we didn’t have a glass of wine,” he says. The restaurant’s name, after all, means “wine mania” and there are bottles lining the walls.
Enomania in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen
JEPPE CARLSEN FOR THE TIMES
A lot of Steensberg’s business dinners are hosted here, as well as his personal ones. Recently they included discussions with a big pharma suitor before Zealand struck a deal worth up to $5.3 billion with Roche, the Swiss multinational, in March, the largest partnership in the burgeoning weight-loss drugs market to date.
Zealand remains a relatively unknown company compared with Novo Nordisk, the Danish company which led the booming breakthrough weight-loss market through its blockbuster Wegovy jab and became Europe’s most valuable public company.
Novo’s “huge influence” is felt not just in Danish industry, but in academia and society, through its private foundation, says Steensberg, who worked at Novo for four years until 2010.
He left to join Zealand, named after Denmark’s largest island, shortly before the company floated on the Danish stock exchange that year, when it raised capital to shift from a research-focused company to clinical development. When he was promoted to chief executive in 2022, Zealand, with a 25-year history in metabolic research, “doubled down” on obesity as its core programmes.
Novo and Eli Lilly, the American owner of Zepbound, have dominated the first-generation weight-loss market through jabs focused on the gut hormone GLP-1. But Steensberg believes their two “quite similar” products are not going to be the “whole solution”.
“The success of Novo and Lilly and others … is also a blessing in the sense that there was awareness suddenly about what we also are trying to do. But of course people would argue, ‘How can you break into this system when you have two giants dominating it?’”
The answer, he says, is by not following in their “footsteps … because then you would continue to be behind them”.
Instead, Zealand has sought to step back from “all this hype” and since hosting a capital markets day in London in late 2022, has set out to redefine “how we believe people should focus on obesity”.
Rather than compete in a big pharma race “towards who can get the highest weight loss; who can get to 30 per cent weight loss the fastest because that is what bariatric surgery can offer patients”, Zealand is pursuing a lower weight loss and a more tolerable treatment for patients.
“The GLP-1s that many people know today … are super-effective molecules, but they are also difficult for patients to be on.”
Zealand’s lead asset, petrelintide, mimics the pancreatic hormone amylin and is being developed to have fewer side-effects and help users reduce food intake “in a more natural way”. This, he says, will make it easier for patients to stay on therapy and maintain weight loss.
“It’s of course still early days, but the general notion with the GLP-1s is that they make people lose their appetite … meaning that if you turn up at a restaurant like this, you would not feel hungry, and some would even feel that they actually don’t like the look of food or wine. And that is very effective in helping people reduce their calorie intake, but it can also be impairing your social lives, because a lot of our social life is around food.”
Instead, the amylin class is designed to induce a sense of feeling full faster. “So you would still turn up [at the restaurant] being hungry, but you would just eat smaller portions,” he says.
Challengers in the market operate in the shadow of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly
As part of this year’s deal with Roche, the two companies have agreed a collaboration and licensing agreement to co-develop and co-commercialise Zealand’s petrelintide as a weekly injection. This will be both as a single therapy and in combination with other drugs, including an earlier potential treatment previously acquired by Roche.
Zealand received $1.65 billion up front and could receive future milestone payments, up to a total of $5.3 billion.
“I had a lot of dinners, like this one, with CEOs because we wanted to share our view on the obesity market and where we thought the entire market, analysts, investors, advisers, were wrong having built all their models around GLP-1s and said, ‘Well, there’s actually significant more value in a new category like we have’.”
By the first half of next year the market will have a greater insight on whether Zealand is right.
The company is expecting a mid-stage phase-II trial read-out of petrelintide. It coincides with a late-stage phase-III read-out of survodutide, a treatment Zealand licenced to Boehringer Ingelheim, the privately owned German pharma group, a decade ago.
Combined, the two trial read-outs will determine whether Zealand becomes a “generational biotech”, a company that can grow and build an innovative portfolio without being acquired by big pharma.
“If it comes out the way we hope … then I don’t think you can find another biotech company that has as much potential right now.”
JEPPE CARLSEN FOR THE TIMES
Thankfully, despite the clinical nature of our conversation, our lunch courses are delicious.
The suggestion of Steenberg, who keeps fit by sea kayaking, that we have dessert and coffee is a welcome one. We enjoy red wine-poached pears with chestnut ice cream and white chocolate.
Given the scale of the obesity crisis, Steensberg believes it will take multiple classes of drugs, some in combination, and “many years before we have the full toolbox”.
“We are only starting to see the tip of the iceberg, because what we have not seen yet is the consequence for those who became obese as children … If we don’t manage to get this obesity pandemic under control, our healthcare systems will break down with diseases that follow.”
It also means, he believes, the biggest market in the history of the pharma industry.
“I have no doubt that it is. We are still so early in addressing this market.”
Some analysts have cut forecasts for the market, partly due to disruption from compounded products in the US and weaker than expected data from next-generation assets. UBS recently forecast $130 billion of GLP-1 sales for 2030, with the “duopoly” of Novo and Lilly intact until then.
Shares in Zealand have halved since a peak last summer, partly, he thinks, because Zealand is “in the back yard of Novo”, which has issued profit warnings. Zealand’s shares fell 11 per cent on Thursday after clinical progress from a competitor drug developed by Lilly.
The Trump administration is putting big pharma and other developed nations under intense pressure to cut drug prices in the face of import tariffs.
Europe, Steensberg believes, must increase the prices it pays for new medicines, “because we have been freewheeling for a long time”, although patients seem prepared to pay for obesity drugs out of their own pockets.
In December Steensberg will be in London — which he visits about eight times a year for investor meetings — for the next capital markets day where Zealand will be “even more ambitious”.
“If you go back and look at our capital markets day two years ago, a lot of what we said is actually where the world is today. That I’m actually pretty happy about.”
CV
Age: 50
Education: D.M.Sc/Dr.med from the University of Copenhagen and an MBA from the International Institute for Management Development, Switzerland
Career: 2010-present, Zealand Pharma (CEO since 2022); 2006-2010, Novo Nordisk, rising to international medical director, global development; 2004-2006, Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, physician
Family: Married with two teenage daughters
Receipt
2 x chitarrine with fish ragu, saffron, courgette and black olives: DKr 220 (£25.90)
2 x risotto with leek and braised veal breast: DKr 290 (£34.20)
2 x red wine-poached pears with chestnut ice cream and white chocolate: DKr 190 (£22.40)
2 x glass of Chambolle-Musigny 2018: DKr 320 (£37.70)
Double espresso: DKr 45 (£5.30)
Single espresso: DKr 35 (£4.10)
Total: DKr 1,100 (£129.70)