About GLP-1 Observer

Who I am

I'm Michael Parker. I'm an MD with a computer science background, and I was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School for many years. While I was there I founded and led HMX, Harvard Medical School's online learning initiative, which brought foundational medical sciences courses to a wide range of learners, including many professionals in pharma and biotech.

That combination (MD plus programmer plus educator) is the lens I bring to GLP-1 Observer. I've spent a lot of my career translating dense biomedical material for people who may not be specialists in biomedical science but are intelligent, curious, and want to understand what's going on.

Why I built this

Over my years at HMX, it became clear to me that for faster-moving fields, courses were a poorly suited way to learn and keep up. I used to describe keeping our range of courses up-to-date as managing a "portfolio of half-lives": physiology material decayed slowly, AI content had a half-life of days, and cutting-edge medicine wasn't far behind that. For areas like advances in obesity/cardiometabolic medicine, a tool like GLP-1 Observer that continuously pulls from the live stream of trials, readouts, and press is much better suited.

The GLP-1 story (and the explosion of related medicines) is one of the biggest pharma stories of this decade, and the way it was being covered when I started paying close attention felt fragmented. Financial-analyst notes and news articles focused on individual trials and updates, without providing much context on what changed or how something relates to other medicines or trials. If you wanted a more complete picture (across mechanisms, trials, programs, and companies) in one place, organized so you could understand it and keep up, there wasn't a good option.

I started GLP-1 Observer in late 2025 because I wanted to solve that problem. I also think that a solution that works well for GLP-1s would apply to other fast-moving areas of biomedicine.

The site is unsponsored and independent. Revenue comes from paid dashboard subscriptions.

What you'll find here

GLP-1 Observer publishes three distinct things:

• The newsletter: free, weekly. A roundup of new trials, trial changes, and key industry highlights, plus educational analysis of a notable trial and a drug mechanism or class.
• The dashboard: paid, with a free tier. Daily-refreshed tracking of every GLP-1 and related obesity drug trial we know about: over 1,000 trials across GLP-1, GIP, amylin, glucagon, and related mechanisms. It pairs that trial tracking with date-change alerts, press feeds, trial results and readouts, a weekly updates digest of what moved, and a competitive pipeline view that maps each company's programs side by side. Because the data is structured and current, you can see changes, comparisons, and patterns across the full landscape that scattered sources can't show.
• GLP-1 Field Guides: free, public, up-to-date. Evergreen explainers on how these drugs work, at both the class level (what a GLP-1 / GIP dual agonist does) and the drug level (what's different about tirzepatide specifically). They're written for intelligent general readers (investors, journalists, well-informed patients, curious readers), not specifically for biotech analysts.

Editorial principles

Explainer, not medical advice. GLP-1 Observer explains how these drugs work and tracks the landscape as it moves. It's not medical advice; you should consult your doctor for treatment decisions.

Primary sources. Claims about trials, approvals, and efficacy are anchored in primary sources: ClinicalTrials.gov, peer-reviewed journals, regulatory filings, and company press releases. Before any field guide is updated, it runs through a dedicated fact-check pass against current authoritative sources to catch citation errors, arithmetic drift, and outdated timing that human review alone tends to miss.

Built on the tracker's own data. Beyond the published literature, the field guides draw on the same structured database that powers the dashboard: our drug registry, trial timelines, press feed, and regulatory-event records across the GLP-1 and obesity-drug landscape. That underlying data is what lets a guide's landscape section stay current and cover the full set of programs in a class, rather than only the ones any single paper happens to mention. The "sources cited" count shown on each guide reflects the external publications; the database sits underneath all of it.

AI-assisted to ensure it's up-to-date. We use AI tools as a crucial way to gather information, as well as to accelerate drafting and fact-checking. Every piece is thoroughly reviewed before publishing. This is a very detailed process with a high bar, backed by thorough evaluation, and you should expect that the result will be better than what a skilled person would do on their own.

Dated and reviewed. Each field guide carries a "Last reviewed" timestamp, and affected guides are flagged for review and updated when meaningful events (approvals, pivotal readouts, major regulatory actions) happen in the class.

Corrections

If you find an error, I want to know. Email glp1_support@bio1up.com with the page URL and what's wrong. Corrections are made promptly, and the guide's "Last reviewed" date is updated to reflect the change. Significant corrections are acknowledged publicly.

Disclosures

We have no conflicts of interest.

Contact

• Newsletter: glp1observer.com
• Dashboard: glp1.bio1up.com
• X: @glp1observer
• Email: glp1_support@bio1up.com