Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
In 2012, the Spiegelman lab at Harvard reported a new peptide hormone, irisin (derived from a known precursor, FNDC5), that seemed to be involved in (among other things) brown-fat-like energy usage and the beneficial effects of exercise. There have been questions from other researchers about this work, but even this time last year work was… Read More
I’ve mentioned metabolic uncoupling as a possible diabetes therapy. The idea is that your mitochondria will plow though large amounts of lipids under these conditions, and there’s plenty of evidence that knocking down free fatty acids and tissue lipid stores would be of great benefit for Type II patients. The problem is that this therap… Read More
Sanofi’s CEO hunt has ended, and the roue de la fortune has pointed to Bayer’s Olivier Brandicourt. (I’m tempted to keep dropping French phrases every couple of lines, but I figure that no one will stand for it, so you can work them in mentally as appropriate). But before his two years at Bayer, Brandicourt… Read More
Since I’ve been following the progress of Zafgen and their unusual drug candidate on the blog, I wanted to note that it just resoundingly passed another Phase II trial. This one was in patients who’ve gained weight to due hypothalamic injury. The Phase III is in the works. Zafgen’s compound is one that most of… Read More
Daiichi Sankyo is apparently crowdsourcing ideas for anti-obesity drug discovery. See this page at NineSigma. The requirements are that the submitted idea: Must be a new anti-obesity drug candidate or drug target Exhibit superior anti-obesity drug efficacy or a better safety profile than existing drugs (phentermine/topiramate, lorcaserin, orlistat) Read More
Here’s an interesting paper for people into metabolic disease: the authors report that JAK1/3 inhibitors (such as tofacitinib) seem to cause human adipocytes to convert from their normal phenotype into brown fat, a different beast altogether. Brown adipocytes are thermoregulators, and burn off lipids at an impressive rate. Many are the the… Read More
Everyone thinks of Novo Nordisk as a diabetes company (and that they are), but they’re willing to use their expertise in related areas. And if you know a lot about insulin and blood sugar regulation, you may also end up knowing a fair amount about appetite and satiety signaling in the gut. The company has… Read More
There have recently been some welcome developments in diabetes therapy, both Type I and Type II. For the latter, there’s an interesting report of a metabolic uncoupling therapy in Nature Medicine. Weirdly, it uses a known tapeworm medication, niclosamide (specifically, the ethanolamine salt). It’s toxic to worms by that same mechanism.… Read More
Here’s some big news: Ron Evans and co-workers at Salk report that treatment with the growth factor FGF1 appears to reverse type II diabetes in mice. (Article in Science Daily on this study here). Evans has been working in this field (diabetes, insulin sensitivity, and related areas like growth factors and nuclear receptors) for a… Read More
I’ve written here before about Zafgen, a small startup targeting obesity therapy with an unusual covalent epoxide drug candidate. Last fall they cleared Phase II, and now they’re going public. Bruce Booth, whose firm has been the VC muscle behind the company, has an overview of how things have worked here. It’s a good read… Read More
