Eli Lilly expanded its metabolic pipeline with a collaboration and exclusive license from Nimbus Therapeutics to develop an oral obesity treatment, a deal worth up to $1.3 billion with $55 million in upfront and near‑term payments. Lilly will apply Nimbus’ computational chemistry and structure‑based design to identify small‑molecule obesity candidates. Separately, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals reported early clinical evidence that its RNAi candidate ARO‑INHBE, given with Lilly’s tirzepatide (Zepbound), produced greater fat loss and liver‑fat reductions than tirzepatide alone in a small cohort. Arrowhead said the combination yielded substantial decreases in visceral fat and overall body fat in interim data. The two developments illustrate continued heavy investment and product‑class layering in obesity therapeutics, as pharma pursues oral small molecules, RNAi strategies and combination regimens to extend and deepen clinical benefit beyond GLP‑1/GIP agonists.