Posted by Alumni from Nature
May 15, 2024
With obesity drugs now helping people to slim down, researchers are working to capitalize on their popularity by bulking up the weight-loss drug pipeline. The latest contender takes a Trojan horse approach ' hiding a small molecule in a gut-hormone-mimicking peptide already used in obesity drugs ' to strike a double blow to the brain cells that control appetite. 'It's a strong paper,' says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, who helped to unravel the role of gut hormones such as GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) and GIP (glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide) in obesity. The blockbuster weight-loss drugs semaglutide (Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound) act by mimicking these hormones, binding to their receptors on neurons in the brain that control hunger pangs. These drugs can help people to lose 15'20% of their body weight. And it could be possible to eke even more activity from these hormone mimics by fusing them to other drugs, the... learn more