A cure for obesity and cancer in one bottle
Specialists have long known that the rapid growth of malignant tumors is ensured by the formation of numerous abnormal blood vessels. Data obtained by researchers at the University of Mississippi, working under the guidance of Dr. Jian-Wei Gu (Jian-Wei Gu), indicate that fat deposits use the same mechanism.
According to Dr. Gu, to date, only three drugs for the treatment of obesity have been officially approved in the United States. Unfortunately, they have only a mild effect and cause a number of undesirable side reactions.
More than 10 years ago, Judah Folkman from Harvard University Medical School, who mainly studied the growth of blood vessels in malignant tumors, found that the growth of adipose tissue in mice can be controlled with the help of angiogenesis inhibitors – drugs that suppress the formation of new vessels. However, he did not continue his research in this direction until his death in 2008.
Taking into account the only article published by Volkman on this issue in 2002, Gu and his colleagues decided to test whether a drug already used in clinical practice to suppress angiogenesis in malignant tumors could help in the fight against obesity.
To do this, they applied sunitinib, a drug approved for the treatment of kidney and bowel cancer, to a mouse model of post–menopausal obesity. In such animals, in order to induce premature menopause at an early age, the ovaries are removed, after which they are kept on a fat-rich diet for 4 weeks, which leads to the development of obesity.
After daily administration of sunitinib with food or in the form of intraperitoneal injections for two weeks, the animals of the experimental groups were compared with the control group mice that did not receive the drug. It turned out that both versions of the drug provided a reduction in body fat by an average of 70% compared to animals of the control group. At the same time, the fat-free body weight of the animals remained unchanged.
In addition to reducing body fat, sunitinib provided appetite suppression, which persists even after the end of therapy. This, apparently, is a side effect of reducing the amount of adipose tissue and, accordingly, the hormones synthesized by it, stimulating appetite at the brain level.
The authors emphasize that many proteins involved in angiogenesis perform many functions in the body, so sunitinib may have unintended side effects that cannot be evaluated in this animal model. Therefore, it is still very early to talk about clinical trials of the drug with the participation of obese patients. In the near future, they plan to study the effectiveness of sunitinib on other animal models of obesity.
The results of the study in the form of a presentation “Angiogenesis Inhibitor, Sunitinib, Significantly Reduces Adipose Tissue Mass in High Fat Diet-Induced Postmenopausal Obese Mice” were published at the Experimental Biology 2013 Congress held on March 20-24 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of the American Physiological Society:
Drug Reduces Fat by Blocking Blood Vessels.
24.04.2013