Balancing Safety Concerns and Long-Term Opportunity: Justifying a Buy Rating on Aardvark Amid ARD-101 Clinical Risks

Analyst Andy Hsieh from William Blair reiterated a Buy rating on Aardvark Therapeutics, Inc. and keeping the price target at $4.07.

Andy Hsieh has given his Buy rating due to a combination of factors, balancing recent safety concerns with the longer‑term opportunity. He notes that while high-dose healthy volunteer data revealed potentially mechanism-based cardiac findings that raise questions about ARD-101’s therapeutic window, these issues emerged at exposures well above intended therapeutic levels.

He also highlights that the pause of the Phase III HERO trial may enable early unblinding, subject to FDA agreement, which could yield earlier insight into efficacy and inform the design of a second registrational study. In his view, despite elevated clinical risk in both PWS and obesity, the current share price already reflects much of this downside, creating an attractive risk/reward setup that supports maintaining an Outperform (Buy) rating on Aardvark shares.