Research

2 February 2011, Nature China has highlighted a research discovery from National Center for Drug Screening, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, CAS in its Molecular Biology chapter titledas “Fat has a new enemy”. Researchers have discovered a compound that restores glucose homeostasis, reduces appetite and decreases body weight in obese mice.
Overeating and under-exercising are causing more and more people to become obese every year. This trend is worrying because obesity significantly increases the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Mingwei Wang and co-workers at the National Center for Drug Screening and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, together with the Scripps Research Institute in USA, previously discovered a novel compound called Boc5 that reduces blood glucose, stimulates insulin secretion and elevates insulin sensitivity in diabetic mice. They have now tested Boc5 on obese mice and found that the compound also reduces body weight and fat.
The researchers fed Boc5 to diet-induced obese mice three times a week for 12 weeks. They found that after treatment, the obese mice had significantly reduced their body weight, body mass index, food intake and fat mass. In addition, insulin, leptin, fatty acid and cholesterol levels in obese mice all returned to normal.
The findings suggest that Boc5 restores a wide range of metabolic disorders through multiple synergistic mechanisms and offers an attractive tool for therapeutic intervention of obesity and diabetes.