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posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2020, @09:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the losing-is-winning dept.

Virginia Tech drug researcher develops 'fat burning' molecule that has implications for treatment of obesity (Science Daily)

"Obesity is the biggest health problem in the United States. But, it is hard for people to lose weight and keep it off; being on a diet can be so difficult. So, a pharmacological approach, or a drug, could help out and would be beneficial for all of society," said Webster Santos, professor of chemistry and the Cliff and Agnes Lilly Faculty Fellow of Drug Discovery in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

Santos and his colleagues have recently identified a small mitochondrial uncoupler, named BAM15, that decreases the body fat mass of mice without affecting food intake and muscle mass or increasing body temperature. Additionally, the molecule decreases insulin resistance and has beneficial effects on oxidative stress and inflammation.

The findings, published in Nature Communications on May 14, 2020, hold promise for future treatment and prevention of obesity, diabetes, and especially nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a type of fatty liver disease that is characterized by inflammation and fat accumulation in the liver. In the next few years, the condition is expected to become the leading cause of liver transplants in the United States.

Mitochondrial uncoupler BAM15 reverses diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance in mice (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16298-2) (DX)

Mitochondrial uncoupler BAM15 inhibits artery constriction and potently activates AMPK in vascular smooth muscle cells (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.apsb.2018.07.010) (DX)

BAM15‐mediated mitochondrial uncoupling protects against obesity and improves glycemic control (open, DOI: 10.15252/emmm.202012088) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday June 13 2020, @03:44PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 13 2020, @03:44PM (#1007461)

    What would really pop things off is some sort of wearable or implanted tricorder-level technology that could be used to provide the equivalent of a personal nutritionist and catch any health issues (like diabeetus) at a very early stage. We could do preventative medicine orders of magnitude better with constant monitoring (at a much greater sophistication than Apple Watch) and at some point, nanobots.

    This... except, we could already do a lot lot better with what we have now.

    Now, labs set reference ranges for blood and other tests using "population" sample sets, they tell your doctor what is or isn't "normal", for the population. What you and your doctor actually need to know is what is normal for you. But generally people only get tests done when they are ill, and are only tested for what the doctor thinks might be making them ill, result? - chronically insufficient information for diagnosis or treatment. Unless you are very very average.

    Do every blood test every year, every 6 months or even more often for young kids, for everyone, always, even when they are healthy. Then when people get ill you will have the data to see what their normal is and what has changed - as opposed to merely looking at how different they are from the population normal. Because, lets face it, many of us here will be quite a long way from population normal even without being ill... :-)

    The reason this isn't done is primarily cost - but if you ramped demand and volume like this, cost would come down even with current tech, and you would spur development of new cheaper high volume tech. And you'd change medicine, I suggest for the better and forever.

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