I’m sure I have mentioned before that one of my favorite pastimes is watching Real Housewives (more specifically Beverly Hills and Atlanta), so naturally I have spent some time watching women try to lose weight. They have gone from eating salted lettuce leafs supplemented with $500/bottle champagne to using a laser on the fat cells in their micro-love-handles.

Although the laser is an actual treatment, it costs thousands of dollars and hour to use these machines and the results are not that promising. For the general public that is not millionaires and possess legitimate problems with weight, there has not been a promising weight loss solution, except from the good-ole exercise and decreasing caloric uptake (unless you believe Ronnie from the Jersey Shore).

This might be on the verge of changing very soon.

Barnhart et al., published last week that they have found a novel peptide that when administered showed 38% reduction in total body fat and 27% reduction in abdominal fat in “spontaneously obese” monkeys (in 4 weeks!).

What is this magical fat-killing peptide?

They synthesized a peptide that targets blood vessels that supply adipose tissue (fat cells) with blood, aptly named adipotide. Adipotide is a Frankenstein protein - it possesses a motif specific for the endothelial cell surface receptor prohibitin (selectively expressed within the vasculature of white adipose tissue) AND a motif that can disrupt mitochondrial membranes upon binding, targeting the cell for apoptosis (or programmed cell death). Therefore, when adipotide binds to the blood vessels required to feed the adipose tissue, the blood vessels are targeted for destruction and the cells in the adiopose tissue die.

Lucky for us, Old World monkeys used in this study (rhesus macaques, baboons and cynomolgus macaques) share considerable physiological features with humans, including obesity-related conditions such as cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and type II diabetes mellitus.

Obese Rhesus macaque eating... and eating.

Can adipotide be used to decrease incidence of diabetes?

They found that adipotide therapy resulted in an improvement in insulin resistance , or a lowered level of insulin in the normal blood glucose, which is a key predictor of diabetes.

Is treatment with adipotide dangerous for an already thin/active population?

My thoughts exactly, we would not want the Real Housewives getting sick, someone needs to entertain me.

The good news is they tested healthy, average weight monkeys with treatment of adipotide and found that they did not lose weight and generally their metabolic levels were not affected. The bad news is that there were lesions on the kidneys of monkeys treated with high doses of adipotide, but these lesions were not seen on monkeys with mid- to low-doses and the lesions were reversible.

More mild side effects cannot be ruled out at this point. They did note that weight loss in monkeys occurred concurrently with reduction in food intake, and since we cannot ask the monkeys if treatment with adipotide made them feel sick, they cannot rule out that nausea could have contributed to decreased food intake and subsequent weight loss. However, they did note that targeting endothelial cells of adipose tissue in obese rats triggers a feedback signal from fat to the hypothalamus to curb appetite, but it is not known to be similar in the tested monkeys.

Summarized, the side effects are mild, predictable and reversible, therefore treatment of adipotide will next been tested for human consumption.

I will let you know if I catch a glimpse of a bottle of adipotide in the next season of Real Housewives.

Barnhart KF, Christianson DR, Hanley PW, Driessen WH, Bernacky BJ, Baze WB, Wen S, Tian M, Ma J, Kolonin MG, Saha PK, Do KA, Hulvat JF, Gelovani JG, Chan L, Arap W, & Pasqualini R (2011). A peptidomimetic targeting white fat causes weight loss and improved insulin resistance in obese monkeys. Science translational medicine, 3 (108) PMID: 22072637