Forbes January 4, 2026
Brian Lian founded publicly traded Viking Therapeutics to focus on metabolic diseases. With obesity drugs in development and the GLP-1 space booming, it’s now a prime M&A target for giants jostling for their share of a potential $100 billion market.
Brian Lian had been working as a Wall Street analyst for nearly a decade when he took a meeting that changed his life.
It was 2012, and he’d been following small- and mid-cap biotech firms that were working on drugs for metabolic diseases. But after meeting with some pharma execs who mentioned their company was open to licensing some recently acquired diabetes drug candidates, he decided to ditch his Wall Street career to strike a deal.
Lian, now 60, had...
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