In search of fat profits

doi:10.1136/bmj.39241.483681.AD

BMJ 2007;334:1298-1299 (23 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.39241.483681.AD

Feature

Obesity

In search of fat profits

Geoff Watts, science editor, BMJ

London

geoff@scileg.freeserve.co.uk

A pill to prevent obesity is proving as elusive to the drugindustry as weight loss is to a growing proportion of the population.Geoff Watts assesses the latest candidates

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

With at least 400 million people worldwide judged to be obese,¹the hard pressed personal trainer needs an assistant. But notnecessarily someone else in shorts and running shoes, badgeringoverweight people to do five minutes more on the exercise bike.The new help—out of sight, and in a laboratory somewhere—couldbe a "chemical metabolic engineer."

Pharmacological attempts to tackle obesity are nothing new.Thyroid hormones have long been known to cause weight loss;unfortunately, that is not all they do. But the molecular biologyof metabolic control has moved rapidly during the past decadeor so. This is perhaps why Ronald Evans, speaking to the 2007experimental biology meeting in Washington, DC, at the end ofApril, felt sufficiently confident about the future to invokethat bold concept of chemical metabolic engineering.

Professor Evans runs the gene expression laboratory at the SalkInstitute in La Jolla, California. The genes . . . [Full text of this article]