It could be the secret dream of those who do not have competitive skills and do not practice sports. It is actually a drug that aims to treat serious conditions such as obesity. As? Mimicking physical exercise. The new compound, developed by a University of Florida pharmacy professor and colleagues, has been tested on mice with promising results. It basically leads obese rodents to lose weight by ‘convincing’ their muscles that they are exercising more than they actually do, therefore increasing the animals’ metabolism. The molecule also increases endurance, helping the mice run almost 50% further than before. All without them moving ‘a paw’.
How the drug works and who it might benefit
The drug belongs to a class known as ‘exercise mimetics’, which provide some of the benefits of exercise without increasing physical activity. The new treatment is in the early stages of development, but could one day be tested in humans, for conditions such as obesity and diabetes and for age-related muscle loss.
The research comes as drugs like Ozempic have begun to make a breakthrough in appetite reduction, helping to treat these metabolic diseases. But the new drug, known as SLU-PP-332, does not affect appetite or food intake. Nor does it cause the mice to exercise more. It simply stimulates a natural metabolic pathway that typically responds to exercise and makes the body act as if it were training for a marathon, leading to increased energy expenditure and faster metabolism of fat in the body.
“This compound tells skeletal muscle to make the same changes you see during resistance training,” says Thomas Burris, who led research on the new drug targeting a group of proteins known as Err, responsible for activating some of the most important metabolic pathways in energy-devouring tissues such as muscles, heart and brain.
The test results
“When you treat mice, you can see that their entire body metabolism turns to using fatty acids, which is very similar to what people do when they fast or exercise. And the animals start to lose weight.” The results of the study, conducted with researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis University, are published in the ‘Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics’. Treating obese mice twice a day for a month caused them to gain 10 times less fat than untreated mice and lose 12% of their body weight. Yet they continued to eat the same amount of food and no longer exercised.
In other work that Burris’ lab is about to publish, researchers found evidence that the compound can also treat heart failure in mice by strengthening the heart muscle. So far the drug has not generated any serious side effects. The next step will be to refine its structure, ideally making it available in pill form rather than injection.
2023-10-04 15:50:00
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