If you could design an oral treatment that limits appetite and mimics some effects of physical activity, you might call it exercise in a pill. Now a company is releasing early results for a compound to do just that.

The pill, the company hopes, can maintain weight loss without the common gastrointestinal effects of GLP-1s. The component of exercise it is designed to re-create is preservation of lean muscle mass, a concern when people yo-yo on and off GLP-1 drugs, losing more muscle each time.

Enveda, a 5-year-old biotech based in Boulder, Colo., announced Phase 1 results in a press release Tuesday for an oral drug candidate that imitates lactate phenylalanine (lac-phe for short), a small molecule metabolite discovered by Stanford scientists. Those researchers showed in a 2022 Nature paper that lac-phe can suppress appetite and lower obesity in animals. Lac-phe and ENV-308, Enveda’s chemically engineered version, both act on leptin, a hormone that has been the target of scientists and drug developers for decades. If confirmed in clinical trials, the company says, ENV-308 would be the first “leptin sensitizer in a pill.”