After axing its lead obesity asset last year, BioAge Labs has turned its attention to attacking inflammation in its pursuit of treatments for aging-related illnesses.
BioAge went public in September 2024 and, a few months later, locked in a $550 million partnership with Novartis, exploring the biological mechanisms underlying conditions related to aging. For BioAge co-founder and CEO Kristen Fortney, Ph.D., the company's pipeline candidates ranged across metabolic and central nervous system diseases all align with a similar mission.
“These drugs might be used initially to treat patients who are already quite sick, but the potential is to go earlier in the course of disease, when they don't have the disease yet, but their biomarkers are off,” Fortney told Fierce on the sidelines of the Fierce Biotech Week in Boston Wednesday. "If you could intervene at that point and delay disease, there's a lot of potential.”
At the center of the BioAge’s strategy is BGE-102, a once-daily oral inhibitor of NLRP3. The NLRP3 space has become a hot target for biopharmas in recent years, with the likes of Eli Lilly, Novartis, Neumora and Neurocrine Biosciences all seeing NLRP3 inhibitors as a way to address a broad range of neuroinflammatory, cardiometabolic, and cardiovascular diseases.
For BioAge, the increased emphasis on NLRP3 came after the company scrapped an apelin receptor agonist, called azelaprag, in January 2025 after the obesity candidate caused elevated liver enzyme levels in a phase 2 trial. NLRP3 and C-reactive protein (CRP) are interrelated components of the immune system that drive inflammation.
"We are also going after CRP inflammatory biomarker," Fortney said. "It's a huge segment of the population and CRP drives not only elevated cardiovascular risk, but all elevated risk for cognitive dysfunction. It's one of the key age-related targets."
While BioAge's azelaprag ambitions have been dropped, Fortney has higher hopes for BGE-102. “People have known about inflammation and disease for decades, but it was always a question of whether it was causal or correlational,” she said.
To demonstrate this connection, the biotech shared phase 1 data last month that suggested BGE-102 resulted in median reductions in reduced high-sensitivity CRP of at least 85% in participants with obesity and elevated baseline inflammation.
BioAge plans to test the drug in a phase 2 proof-of-concept trial in patients with cardiovascular risks in mid-2026. A phase 1b/2a proof-of-concept trial in diabetic macular edema (DME) is planned to begin in the middle of this year, with results anticipated mid-2027.
“NLRP3 is implicated in neuroinflammation, but also retinal inflammation,” Fortney explained to Fierce.
“We saw in our human data that NLRP3 was important in the brain, and we built a drug that gets into the brain and the eye,” the CEO added. “We're also going to be evaluating this drug in a different patient population to see if it can improve vision.”
William Blair analysts appeared to give their blessing to this strategy, saying in a Monday note that they are “encouraged by the expansion into ophthalmology indications, which we believe could provide investors with multiple shots on goal for BGE-102 beyond the cardiometabolic space.”
The analysts also pointed to phase 2 data from Ventyx—an NLRP3-focused biotech that was snapped up by Lilly for $1.2 billion in January—as strengthening the case for NLRP3-targeting therapeutics to “carve out a niche as complementary therapeutics to GLP-1/GIP agonists rather than competing head-to-head with them.”
In BioAge’s pursuit of fighting aging, Fortney says BGE-102 holds the promise of a multi-pronged approach targeting the root cause of several related indications: inflammation.
“If you want to make an animal live longer, you have to have everything go right,” she said. “You have to impact multiple organ systems, and we were excited about learning from aging biology to have a multi-disease impact.”