In a new study from Northwest A&F University, researchers found an anti-tumor drug promotes weight loss in mice at low doses by activating a natural hunger-suppressing pathway.
The results provide a promising new avenue for development of anti-obesity treatments.
Growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15) is a hormone that circulates in response to a wide variety of stimuli, including stress.
Previous work has shown that elevation of GDF15 leads to a drop in body weight, while suppression of it leads to obesity.
In the study, the team used a database of gene expression profiles of human cells in response to drug exposure.
They found that cells exposed to a drug called camptothecin increased their expression of GDF15.
Camptothecin is derived from the Asian tree Camptotheca acuminata, and is a known inhibitor of a DNA repair enzyme (hence its use as an anti-tumor drug).
In obese mice, the team showed that oral administration of camptothecin rapidly elevated the level of GDF15 in the blood, and over the course of 30 days, reduced food intake by about 12% and body weight by about 11%.
In contrast, in lean mice, camptothecin did not elevate GDF15 and there was no effect on either food intake or body weight.
Camptothecin has been studied in anti-cancer trials, but was ultimately set aside due to safety concerns.
Its safety as an anti-obesity drug has yet to be determined, but the dose used in this study, if scaled up to a human, would be about one-thirtieth of the lowest dose used in human anti-cancer trials.
Additionally, the anti-obesity mechanism appears to be separate from the anti-cancer mechanism.
The team says the results convincingly argue that camptothecin may have therapeutic benefits for obesity and its associated metabolic disorders.
Further study is needed to evaluate its efficacy and safety in advanced models to increase the translational impact.
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The study is published in PLOS Biology.
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