GLP-1 drugs have shown the world that blockbuster medicines don’t have to treat disease in the traditional sense. But according to Christian Angermayer, founder of Apeiron Investment Group, weight loss is just the beginning. In this conversation, he maps out the scientific frontiers of consumer biotech, from AMPK activators and muscle biology to psychedelics, sexual health, and cognitive enhancement, and explains why most investors are dramatically underpricing what’s coming.

The GLP-1 Moment Changed Everything

The explosion of GLP-1 receptor agonists, drugs like semaglutide, originally developed for type 2 diabetes, into mainstream weight loss medicines has done something profound for biotech: it has legitimised the idea that medicines can improve how people feel and look, not just treat disease in the clinical sense.

But Angermayer argues the GLP-1 wave is just the opening act. “Everybody’s talking about weight loss,” he says. “But the whole spectrum is vanity, and what are people interested in? How they look. That’s weight loss, but it’s also muscle gain.”

This framing, consumer biotech as a spectrum of human enhancement rather than pure disease treatment, is central to how Apeiron thinks about investing. And it starts with a problem that GLP-1s have inadvertently created.

The Muscle Problem: Why the Next Big Drug Might Be an AMPK Activator

One of the most discussed side effects of current GLP-1 medications is muscle loss. When people lose weight rapidly, they don’t only shed fat; they also lose lean muscle mass. For many patients, this is a significant concern, particularly older users for whom maintaining muscle is directly linked to long-term health, mobility, and quality of life.

This has opened the door to a new class of drugs targeting muscle biology. Angermayer highlights retatrutide, a triple agonist targeting GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon receptors, as a compound that appears to preserve muscle mass more effectively than earlier GLP-1 drugs. But he goes further, pointing to a portfolio company called Cambrian that is developing an AMPK activator currently entering Phase 2 trials.

AMPK, adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase, is often described as the body’s master energy sensor. It plays a central role in regulating metabolism, glucose uptake, and crucially, muscle growth and repair. Activating AMPK pharmacologically could, in theory, mimic some of the effects of exercise at a cellular level, making it easier to build and maintain muscle mass.

“We just announced we’re going into Phase 2 with a drug that might even help you gain muscles much more easily,” Angermayer explains.

If the clinical data holds, the implications extend well beyond patients with muscle-wasting conditions. The addressable market for a safe, effective muscle gain drug would be enormous, and yet, as Angermayer notes, it is currently being valued only on its clinical indication.

Sexual Health: The Most Underserved Category in Medicine

Few areas of medicine are as scientifically underexplored relative to their prevalence as sexual health. Since Viagra’s approval in 1998, the field has seen remarkably little innovation, particularly in areas beyond erectile dysfunction.

Angermayer makes a pointed observation: “We only have one, if we wanna call it that, sex drug, which is Viagra.” For a category that touches on fertility, pleasure, hormonal health, and psychological wellbeing, this is a striking gap.

One area he highlights is premature ejaculation, a condition affecting somewhere in the low single-digit percentage of men globally, formally defined as reaching orgasm in under 30 seconds following penetration. Despite being a recognised clinical indication, it remains largely untreated.

Apeiron has backed a Phase 2 company developing a drug for premature ejaculation that, in clinical trials, has extended duration by an average of seven minutes, and crucially, the effect appears to apply not just to those with the clinical condition, but to anyone who takes it. Side effects so far have been minimal.

The investment logic here is elegant: “I’m paying a valuation derived from how big the medical market is only, but I’m getting the full free upside that once this drug is approved, most men will take it, because who wouldn’t want to have longer sex?”

This is a recurring theme in Angermayer’s thinking: the gap between how markets price a drug’s clinical indication and the much larger consumer market that could follow approval.

Psychedelics: First-Line Treatment, Not Last Resort

Perhaps nowhere is this pricing gap more pronounced than in psychedelics. Angermayer is a co-founder of ATAI Life Sciences, one of the world’s leading psychedelic medicine companies, so he is candid about his bias. Still, the scientific case he makes is hard to dismiss.

The current clinical development of psychedelic compounds, including psilocybin, MDMA, and novel compounds in ATAI’s pipeline, is largely focused on conditions like treatment-resistant depression and generalised anxiety disorder. These are the indications that regulatory agencies like the FDA will approve, and they are the indications that analysts and investors use to value these companies.

But Angermayer argues this dramatically underestimates the eventual market. His reasoning is threefold:

First, the side effect profile. Classical psychedelics have shown, repeatedly across decades of research and more recently in controlled clinical trials, a remarkably clean safety profile compared to existing psychiatric medications. SSRIs, the current first-line treatment for depression, carry well-documented side effects including sexual dysfunction, emotional blunting, and withdrawal difficulties. “Why would any doctor say, ‘Let’s try the shitty stuff first’?” Angermayer asks.

Second, the efficacy data. The clinical trial results for psilocybin in depression, published in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine, represent some of the most impressive data in psychiatry in a generation. A single or small number of guided sessions have produced sustained antidepressant effects lasting months, a fundamentally different mechanism from daily oral medications.

Third, the prevention argument. Perhaps most provocatively, Angermayer believes psychedelics will ultimately be used preventatively, not just to treat clinical depression, but to maintain mental wellbeing before someone crosses the diagnostic threshold. “Why would you wait until you’re clinically depressed?” he asks. “Once psychedelics are on the market, people will realise it’s much better to never get depressed in the first place.”

If even a fraction of this thesis proves correct, the market for approved psychedelic medicines would dwarf what current analyst models project.

The Investing Framework: Clinical Indication as the Floor, Not the Ceiling

Running through all of these examples – muscle gain, sexual health, psychedelics – is a single, elegant investment thesis: buy the clinical indication, get the consumer upside for free.

Because the FDA only approves drugs for specific medical indications, early valuations are almost always anchored to the size of that clinical market. Off-label use, the widespread prescription of approved drugs for conditions beyond their licensed indication, is common in medicine (it accounts for a significant proportion of all prescriptions) but is rarely modelled into early-stage biotech valuations.

“At the moment, the valuations for these companies are only derived from their clinical indication,” Angermayer explains. “Even if only the clinical indication happened, I make good money. But then I have this free option if this becomes a lifestyle drug.”

This is not a new phenomenon, it is essentially what happened with GLP-1 drugs, where medicines developed for diabetes became the most commercially successful drugs in history once their weight loss effects were recognised and marketed. The difference is that Angermayer is trying to identify these situations before the market has priced them in.

Skin, Hair, Intelligence: The Broader Landscape

Beyond the three areas discussed in depth, Angermayer briefly maps out other frontiers he sees as significant:

Skin and hair. Dermatology and trichology (the science of hair and scalp) remain areas of high consumer demand and relatively limited pharmacological innovation. Treatments for hair loss, in particular, have seen little meaningful advancement since finasteride and minoxidil, both decades-old molecules with significant limitations.

Cognitive enhancement. Perhaps the most philosophically complex frontier: drugs that improve learning, memory recall, or general cognitive performance. Angermayer observes that “we accept, because we haven’t thought about it as a society, that we’re born with a certain IQ”, and argues this assumption will be challenged. The scientific questions here are genuinely hard (which aspects of cognition to target, how to measure improvement, what the long-term effects might be), but the commercial opportunity, if any compound achieves meaningful effects with an acceptable safety profile, would be extraordinary.

Longevity. Apeiron was one of the earliest investors in the longevity space, companies developing drugs that target the biological mechanisms of ageing rather than individual diseases. The regulatory challenge has always been the same: you cannot run a trial with lifespan as the primary endpoint. But progress in surrogate biomarkers of ageing, from epigenetic clocks to inflammation markers, is gradually making clinical development of longevity drugs more tractable.

What This Means for the Future of Biotech

Consumer biotech is not a departure from serious science; it is serious science applied to the full range of human biology, including the parts that medicine has historically been reluctant to address.

The drugs Angermayer describes are not wellness supplements or unproven biohacks. They are rigorously developed, FDA-regulated pharmaceuticals that happen to have applications beyond their licensed indications. The clinical trials are real, the safety data is real, and the biology is as complex and interesting as anything in oncology or rare disease.

What is different is the market logic. In traditional therapeutic biotech, you are racing to treat patients who have no other options. In consumer biotech, you are treating patients first, and then watching as the market expands to include everyone who simply wants to feel, look, or perform better.

As Angermayer puts it: “That’s why I’m so excited.”

Christian Angermayer is the founder of Apeiron Investment Group and co-founder of AtaiBeckley. This post is based on a recorded interview conducted for the Flot.bio podcast. Watch the full episode here: Billionaire wild bets on Consumer Biotech, GLP-1s, and psychedelics | Christian Angermayer | E61