X-Message-Number: 24088
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 11:41:01 -0700
Subject: Future CR adjunct?
From: Kennita Watson <>

Mice fight the flab
Cancer strategy could be used to treat obesity.
10 May 2004

NADJA NEUMANN

If you want to kill fat, take away its blood supply.
Source: Nature

Chubby mice have shaped up with a new slimming aid, based on a 
technique used in cancer therapy that destroys blood vessels. The 
researchers say that after clinical trials on humans this may become a 
useful weapon in the war on obesity.

One promising technique for treating cancer involves starving a tumour 
of the nutrients it needs to grow. The most effective way to do this is 
by killing off the blood vessels that supply the cancer cells. This 
technique is currently being evaluated in clinical trials.

In the same way, each fat cell relies on a network of capillaries to 
deliver the chemicals it needs to reproduce and grow. So Mikhail 
Kolonin and his colleagues from the University of Texas and Baylor 
College of Medicine, Texas, reasoned that if they could kill off these 
blood vessels, the fat cells would die too.

To do this, they targeted a molecule called prohibitin. It is present 
on the surface of fat cells, but not other types of cells, and it helps 
to regulate the growth of surrounding blood vessels. The researchers 
took a fragment of protein that binds to prohibitin, and attached it to 
another protein fragment that is used in cancer therapy to kill blood 
vessels.

In order to test whether the composite molecule works to destroy fat, 
the researchers fed two groups of mice a high calorie diet. Once the 
mice were overweight, the researchers injected the molecule under their 
skin each day for four weeks. The animals treated with the protein 
fragment ate less food and lost 30% of their original weight, but 
remained healthy1.

"It is an approach with great potential," says Peter Carmeliet, a 
biologist from Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology in 
Belgium. He points out that fat cells grow into much bigger masses than 
tumours, so this starvation technique could potentially work even 
better against obesity than cancer.
References

    1. Arap, W. et al. Nature Medicine, published online, 
doi:10.1038/nm1048 (2004). |Article|


  Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

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