New Combination of Anti-obesity Drugs may have Beneficial Effects

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Research conducted in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has revealed that a unique combination of hormone-based drugs can produce enhanced weight loss in laboratory tests with obese animals. The research is to be presented this week at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB).

"Imagine a drug regimen where an obese person would cycle between different drug therapies over the course of a month to achieve a greater degree of body weight loss compared to the effects achieved with either a single drug or the continuous combination of drugs," said senior author Dr. Matthew Hayes. His team studied the combination of two different drug classes that target different hormones: amylin and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). They found that combined treatments acted synergistically to suppress feeding and body weight. They also discovered that the weight loss effects of chronic amylin- and GLP-1-based combination therapies could be enhanced when obese lab animals are cycled through their drug treatments. "The idea of drug-cycling is nothing new," says lead author Kieran Koch-Laskowski. "Millions of women on birth control pills, for example, already take daily pills that cycle between drug and placebo throughout the month," she goes on to say.

Perhaps the most exciting finding of the current data coming out of Penn is the fact that the research finds these enhanced weight loss effects with a combination of drugs that are either already FDA approved or in clinical trials for metabolic diseases, "making the translational impact of our work extremely timely and highly clinically relevant!" says Hayes. The authors are now finalizing their research to demonstrate mechanically how these two hormonal systems interact to achieve greater weight loss in the hopes of fast-tracking their findings to new clinical treatments for obesity.

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