Webinar Registration

Keeping Pace with Obesity Drug Development: Recent Advances in OBESITYsym

The uptake of injectable obesity drugs like semaglutide, tirzepatide, and liraglutide has been high, and the new wave of oral medications promises even greater adoption. The availability of effective weight loss drugs is having a tremendous positive impact for patients with obesity worldwide.

The clinical development pipeline remains rich, including compounds that target additional mechanisms for weight loss and reducing nausea. This is both good and bad news for pharma companies—there is a lucrative market and high demand for new treatments, but also intense competition.

In this webinar, our Chief Science Officer of QSP, Dr. Scott Q. Siler, will discuss how quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) can increase the efficiency of clinical development efforts.

Using the OBESITYsym model, Scott will show you how to simultaneously predict weight loss and nausea for a given treatment in a simulated population of patients with obesity. While the original model was calibrated and validated with numerous compounds, including the injectable drugs on market, it has since been expanded to include the two oral drugs currently available to patients, semaglutide and orforglipron, and drugs with additional mechanistic components, such as the GLP1-GIP-GLP triple agonist, retatrutide. Attendees will get a first look at how these updates provide a competitive edge, and have a chance to get questions answered in real-time during the Q&A.

If you’re developing an obesity drug, this is a webinar you won’t want to miss.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026
8:00 am - 9:00 am PDT

Speakers

Scott Q. Siler, Ph.D.

Chief Science Officer
Simulations Plus

Scott Q Siler, Ph.D. is the Chief Science Officer of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology at Simulations Plus.   Dr. Siler leads the quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) and toxicology (QST) efforts within Simulations Plus.   On the QSP front, Dr. Siler has led the development and application of NAFLDsym, which has been used to evaluate >25 non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) compounds and/or targets to date.   He has also led the development and application of IPFsym, a QSP model of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which has been used to evaluate >10 compounds and/or targets to date.   Dr. Siler has also led the de novo development of several focused QSP model development efforts to support the development of specific assets across a variety of therapeutic areas for several pharma companies.   On the QST side, Scott has led and contributed to the development of DILIsym.   DILIsym has been used to evaluate the risk for drug-induced liver injury (DILI) of >80 compounds to date and is arguably the most successful QST model available for use.

Prior to joining Simulations Plus, Dr. Siler worked for more than 12 years integrating physiology and mathematics with Entelos, a provider of in silico modeling and simulation products and consulting services. Dr. Siler managed and contributed to the development of the Metabolism PhysioLab during that time. Additionally, while at Entelos, he led multiple projects evaluating potential treatments for type 2 diabetes.

Christina Battista, Ph.D.

Senior Principal Scientist (Moderator)
Simulations Plus

Christina Battista, Ph.D., is a Senior Principal Scientist at Simulations Plus, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Drug Safety Sciences located within the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Dr. Battista, along with Lisl Shoda, is exploring the role of the immune system in drug-induced liver injury (DILI) with a particular focus on mechanistic modeling of the adaptive immune system, in hopes of investigating cases of idiosyncratic DILI. Christina also works on modeling and evaluating new exemplar compounds to be included in future versions of DILIsym software.   Dr. Battista also utilizes DILIsym in proprietary projects to help evaluate DILI risk for sponsor compounds in clinical development.

Dr. Battista received her bachelor of science and master of science in applied and computational mathematics from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011. Her master’s thesis modeled parathyroid hormone and cell signaling dynamics in bone remodeling to predict the efficacy of osteoporosis treatments. Dr. Battista earned her Ph.D. in applied mathematics with an interdisciplinary concentration in physiology from North Carolina State University in 2015. Her research focused on parameter estimation and modeling one-dimensional blood flow in viscoelastic arterial networks.

In June 2016, Dr. Battista received an ORISE fellowship to investigate mechanistic drug safety within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the FDA under the guidance of Darrell Abernethy. Christina is also a member of the Pi Mu Epsilon and Alpha Sigma Lambda honor societies and was named a John Wiley Jones scholar at RIT. She has presented her research at numerous engineering, math, and biology conferences. Most notably, Dr. Battista has given presentations at the World Congress of Biomechanics and the Joint Mathematics Meetings. Her current work will be presented at future pharmacology conferences, such as the American Conference on Pharmacometrics (ACoP).

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