Single-celled organisms reprogrammed to create a molecule that turns into a hunger-suppressing lipid through regular metabolism may be the means to fix the obesity epidemic, according to new research presented Monday in the annual American Chemical Society (ACS) expo.
In the study, Sean Davies from the Vanderbilt University Med school and his colleagues put the microbes in the water of mice, and people who drank it ate less, had reduced excess fat and were even able to stave off diabetes, even when they consumed an eating plan which has high in fat. The findings indicate that the bacteria may help humans lose weight as well, the authors claim.
According to the ACS, one-third of Americans is obese, a disorder that can lead to heath ailments such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes type 2, plus some types of cancer. Efforts to battle the epidemic have largely failed, they said, because weight-loss medication and changes in lifestyle tend to have modest, short-term effects.
Recent research has suggested that gut microbes could play a key role in determining the chance of obesity and related conditions, indicating that creating strategic changes to the gut microbiome could have a positive effect on overall health. Davies noted that one benefit of this method is the fact that treatment would only have to be administered periodically.
Davies and the team attempted to produce a special kind of therapeutic bacteria that could live in a person’s gut for at least six months. As opposed to weight-loss drugs that should be taken at least one time each day, this method provides sustained treatment over a long period of time, and it will make it so that patients wouldn’t need to constantly take diet pills.
The researchers used selected N-acyl-phosphatidylethanolamines (NAPEs) as a therapeutic molecule. NAPEs are produced within the small intestine after a meal and therefore are quickly changed into N-acyl-ethanolamines (NAEs), potent appetite-suppressing lipids. They altered the genes of the probiotic bacteria strain so that it would produce NAPEs and added it towards the drinking water of mice that typically become obese and develop related health problems when fed a high-fat diet.
When compared to mice that received plain water or water containing non-altered bacteria, those drinking the NAPE-making bacteria gained approximately 15 percent less weight over an eight-week treatment period. Furthermore, their livers and glucose metabolism were better than that of the control mice, and those that received the therapy remained lighter and leaner than control mice for up to three months following the treatments came to an end.
Additional experiments says mice which lacked the enzyme to create NAEs from NAPEs weren’t helped by the NAPE-making bacteria, but this issue could be overcome by giving those creatures NAE-making bacteria instead. This led Davies to summarize that “it might be best to use NAE-making bacteria in eventual clinical trials,” particularly if his team finds that some individual cannot produce an adequate amount of the enzyme that converts NAPEs to NAEs.
Davies believes that the treatment option “would work very well in humans,” but any human trials face one big obstacle: the potential risk that a treated person could transmit these special bacteria to another by fecal exposure.
“We don’t want visitors to be unintentionally treated without their knowledge,” he explained. “Especially since you could imagine there might be a lot of people, say the very young or old or individuals with specific diseases, who might be harmed by being exposed to an appetite-suppressing bacteria. So, we are focusing on genetically modifying the bacteria to significantly reduce its ability to be transmitted.”
