Is There Something Better Than Ozempic?
A new paper released in Nature this week discusses a new therapy for obesity that researchers say leads to more weight loss in mice than existing GLP-1 weight-loss medications, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound, alone. The medication works a little differently than those injections by specifically smuggling molecules into your brain and changing how it thinks about food. This “Trojan horse” of weight-loss drugs might one day be available for human use.
“I consider the drugs available on the market today as the first generation of weight-loss drugs,” says the new study’s senior author Christoffer Clemmensen, an associate professor from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen.
In the group’s study, a “Trojan horse” is used to smuggle a molecule into the brain, where it’s then able to change the brain’s plasticity, ultimately leading to weight loss. The molecule works by blocking a receptor protein called the NMDA receptor.
Excerpted from Fast Company
