Exercise in a bottle?
2004-04-02 10:46
Melbourne - An anti-obesity pill which mimics the effect of exercise on the body is being developed through a protein that regulates how food is transformed into energy, an Australian research team announced here on Friday.
Scientists at St Vincent's Institute in Melbourne are basing their work on a decade-old local discovery of an enzyme, AMPK, which works as a "fuel guage" in cells to regulate how food is burned up by the body, institute director Tom Kay said.
"Exercise is one of the things that helps you effectively use food and exercise activates the protein that has been discovered here," Kay said.
A team of about 20 scientists is now engaged on the development of the fat pill at the institute in which a new $10.5m research building was officially opened on Friday.
As well as the fat pill, the institute's scientists are researching ways to combat osteoporosis, HIV, cancer and diabetes.
Kay said what the team was attempting was to discover drugs which will activate this process in exactly the same way exercise does "so that you could take a pill which gave you the beneficial effects of exercise".
The new drug would be particularly useful for overweight people who had injuries or arthritis, Kay said.
"The other thing is that behavioural approaches to obesity have limited success in terms of sustaining weight loss and it may be that this sort of drug is more broadly applicable as well."
Kay gave no indication of how long it might take to develop the pill, but said the new research centre would help in its development.
"Advances in medical research depend on state-of-the-art facilities and depend on fantastic scientists and you need both of those things to go hand in hand," he said.