TARGETED OBESITY DRUG THERAPY

When you’re at a comedy stand-up show, the comedian’s ultimate goal is to make you laugh. When listening to a speech from the President of the United States, his or her goal is to make you feel confident. But what they say is only part of the equation. How they say it matters just as much in producing the desired effect. As the saying goes, it’s all in the delivery. In much the same way, effective delivery may hold the key to successful pharmaceutical treatment of obesity.

Weight loss drugs have been around for more than 50 years, yet the road to developing the magic pill has been fairly rocky. While a handful of medications have made it through the gauntlet of FDA approval and show some positive signs of success, the side effects associated with most are what keep them from broad patient acceptance. Some notable examples of unwanted and even dangerous side effects include cardiovascular risk, gastrointestinal issues, and psychiatric problems.

The challenge for these medications in producing weight loss without side effects may lie in their delivery or format. These drugs have all been in pill form, which is the most accessible form of medication for patients, but presents challenges in getting the medication to its intended destination (fat cells) through the digestive tract. The pills have to jump over several hurdles within the body before reaching the finish line and create a lot of havoc along the way for other organs and bodily functions.

But new research out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may be a game changer for obesity pharmaceutical therapy. Scientists have developed nanoparticles that can deliver medication directly to fat tissue, producing phenomenal results of 10% weight loss over 25 days. And they can do this without negative side effects on other parts of the body. This type of medication delivery has also been used in cancer treatment, producing similar positive outcomes with very limited side effects.

Before you get too excited, we should mention that there are significant hurdles to the mainstream use of the nanoparticle approach. The first is that the types of drugs used in the study have not been FDA-approved for obesity treatment, and the approval process is notoriously long. It is unclear if nanoparticles can be used for existing FDA-approved weight loss drugs. The second is that the nanoparticles were administered intravenously and not in the more accessible pill format. Researchers will need to pursue ways to produce the same types of weight loss results for pill format as they have effectively done for intravenous delivery.

Regardless, this type of research provides a great deal of optimism to those in the medical community fighting every day for their patients suffering from obesity. As research plows ahead, we encourage you to leverage every available proven resource in your daily weight management efforts. Remember, you play the central role in delivering the types of results you want to see.