// Peter DiLaura. Wharton economics, then thirty years teaching molecules to behave.
The obesity field is in a gold rush. He is running the company that wants to take a hormone off the table instead of barricading its door.
In a converted office in San Mateo, a team of eight is trying to do something the obesity field mostly skipped over: pull a hormone called GIP out of the bloodstream rather than plug the receptor it docks into. The man asked to turn that contrarian idea into a medicine is Peter DiLaura, and he has done this dance before - quietly, repeatedly, for nearly three decades.
Helicore Biopharma came out of stealth in January 2025 with $65 million and a clinic-ready antibody. DiLaura is its CEO and a director on its board. His job is not to invent the science; that work, a first-in-class GIP ligand-binding antibody, was already humming when he arrived. His job is the harder, less glamorous part: assembling the people, the money, and the discipline that carries a promising molecule from a slide deck to a syringe.
That is the work he keeps getting handed. Microbiome therapeutics at Second Genome. Regulatory T cell therapies at Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Protein-modulating small molecules at Initial Therapeutics. New-company creation at Third Rock Ventures. Four wildly different frontiers of medicine, one constant operator standing in the middle of each, building the scaffolding around the science.
For some time, I have been following the company with keen interest - it is doing exciting and original work.Peter DiLaura
GIP is an incretin hormone, a cousin of the now-famous GLP-1. The obesity drugs that minted billions go after receptors. Helicore goes one step upstream and aims a monoclonal antibody at the circulating GIP ligand itself, neutralizing it before it ever reaches a receptor. The genetic hint that this could work: people born with loss-of-function mutations in their GIP genes tend to be protected from obesity.
Block the GIP receptor on the cell. Effective, but it is the path most of the field is racing down at once.
Bind and remove the GIP hormone in the blood. The aim: preferential fat loss, restored leptin sensitivity, and cardiometabolic upside when paired with GLP-1.
Helicore pairs its GIP antibody with engineered peptide partners. The lead asset, HCR-188, has Phase 1 validation; the conjugates aim for quarterly-or-less dosing.
// Bars reflect relative program maturity, not clinical endpoints.
Before the white coats and clinical trials, DiLaura spent the 2000s at Ingenuity Systems, a bioinformatics software company. He joined as the business development lead and left having grown revenue from zero to more than $30 million a year, running a team of 40. It is an unusual pedigree for a life-sciences CEO - commercial muscle built selling tools to scientists before he ran the science itself.
From there the pattern set in. He took the top job at Second Genome when the microbiome was the frontier everyone was whispering about. He moved to Third Rock Ventures as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the role venture firms reserve for people they trust to conjure companies out of raw biology. At Sonoma Biotherapeutics he built the unglamorous machinery - finance, legal, intellectual property, investor relations, HR - that lets a science team actually function. In April 2024 he was named CEO of Initial Therapeutics. Within a year, Helicore came calling.
The through-line is not a single disease or modality. It is the act of building - of being the steady operator a board hands the keys to when the science is real and the company is not yet one.
BS in Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Ingenuity Systems. From zero to $30M+ in annual revenue; team of 40.
CEO, Second Genome - microbiome therapeutics.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Third Rock Ventures.
Chief Business & Strategy Officer, Sonoma Biotherapeutics.
Named President & CEO, Initial Therapeutics.
CEO & Board Director, Helicore Biopharma.
CEO and Board Director. Long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates for obesity and cardiometabolic disease.
President & CEO of a company developing novel protein-modulation small molecules.
Chief Business & Strategy Officer. Drove financing and built core corporate functions for the Treg therapy company.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, focused on conjuring new companies from early science.
Led a pioneering microbiome therapeutics company.
Independent Director, lending operator perspective to two more biotechs.
He scaled a software company before he ever ran a drug company. The commercial instinct came first; the biology came later. That order is rarer than it sounds.
His CV reads like a tour of medicine's frontiers - microbiome, regulatory T cells, protein modulation, obesity. He is a generalist operator in a field that worships specialists.
Helicore's whole thesis is a refusal to follow the herd. While rivals crowd the GIP receptor, his company aims at the hormone itself - the bet that the road less traveled is less crowded for a reason worth testing.
The aspiration is blunt: weight loss that keeps your muscle, restores the body's own signals, and asks for a shot once a quarter instead of once a week.The Helicore mission, in plain terms