New Weight-Loss Drug Reduces Body Weight in Monkeys, Mice

Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a drug that assaults the blood supply of fat cells and led to weight loss in obese rhesus monkeys.

Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., co-senior author of the study and professor in MD Anderson's David H. Koch Center for Applied Research for Genitourinary Cancers, along with Wadih Arap, M.D., co-senior author of the study and a professor in the Koch Center, and Kirstin Barnhart, D.V.M., Ph.D., veterinary clinical pathologist at MD Anderson's Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, have created a new weight-loss drug that could potentially reduce accumulated white fat in humans.

Currently, weight-loss drugs work to suppress the appetite or increase metabolism in order to combat obesity, but harmful side effects come with the use of such drugs.

Now, Pasqualini and Arap have designed a new drug called Adipotide, which attacks white adipose tissue. This tissue is an unhealthy kind of fat that accumulates around the abdomen and under the skin. Adipotide contains a homing agent that attaches to a protein on the surface of blood vessels that support the fat. A synthetic peptide then triggers cell death, and with a lack of blood supply, the fat cells are reabsorbed.

The drug was used in mice models and rhesus monkey models. Adipotide was able to decrease abdominal circumference, body mass index (BMI) and body fat.

According to the study, the obese mice lost about 30 percent of their body weight while on Adipotide. The rhesus monkeys in the study, which were "spontaneously" obese due to overeating and a lack of physical activity, had a 27 percent decrease in abdominal fat levels. The drug reduced the weight of rhesus monkeys by 11 percent in just one month...