An "exercise pill": the promising Catalan research that could overshadow Ozempic

BarcelonaDrugs like Ozempic, which suppress hunger, have revolutionized the fight against obesity, type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver disease worldwide. They mimic the functioning of a hormone in the intestine to generate a feeling of satiety in those taking them, and their emergence has radically changed the lives of many patients, as they previously did not have such effective therapeutic alternatives. Now, a group of Catalan researchers has discovered in a study a new protein that, like these drugs, could treat obesity without modifying the patient's diet. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, It has been carried out on mice, and the results are very preliminary but also very promising.

"There are two ways to lose body weight and reduce the amount of fat. The most obvious is to eat less food, as Ozempic achieves. We now propose another method: increasing the amount of energy expenditure of the patient so that they burn more calories," explains researcher Zorzano from the Barcelona Research Institute to ARA. The protein they have identified is called neuritin 1, and the researchers have verified that, if its presence is increased in the body of an overweight mouse, its health improves: it loses weight, gains sensitivity to insulin and liver inflammation is reduced, even in mice that have followed hypercaloric diets.

Increased energy consumption

It's a kind of "exercise pill," Zorzano summarizes. This protein is found in brown adipose tissue, which is one of the organs that produce the most heat to maintain body temperature: it takes nutrients, such as sugars and fats, and converts them into heat. The Catalan authors have seen that this protein plays a key role in this process and have increased its presence in mice to see if they could get them to burn more sugars and fats and, therefore, not gain weight. "The animals consume more energy, which prevents fat accumulation," explains the lead researcher.

For Manuela Sánchez-Feutrie, an IRB researcher and co-author of the study, the research conclusions suggest that the protein could have "great therapeutic value for treating obesity and its comorbidities, such as type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease." Neuritin 1 has similar characteristics to the one used in these drugs, which leads the authors to believe that it could be induced in patients' bodies in the same way, with a weekly injection, although they need to study it further to fully determine this.

Thus, the authors of the study are looking at a promising strategy for combating obesity, although they emphasize that there is still a long way to go. "We shouldn't exaggerate, but we are reasonably optimistic, because this mouse protein is very similar to that of humans," explains Zorzano, who believes that right now the main problem is the funding they need to continue the research. Even so, he does not hide the fact that both he and his team are very hopeful about this discovery, and says they hope to continue studying this strategy. In fact, they have already filed a patent application for the use of this protein as a way to combat obesity.

The study has benefited from the collaboration of multiple scientific platforms at IRB Barcelona, ​​​​such as Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, Functional Genomics, Protein Expression, and Histopathology; as well as the participation of researchers from international institutions such as the CNRS (France), the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), and the University of Houston (USA).