June 10, 2009 Researchers at Imperial College London have
identified a new appetite suppressant for promoting weight loss
that they say works in rodents and may one day be used to
develop an effective anti-obesity treatment. Results of the new
study were presented at The Endocrine Society's 91st Annual
Meeting in Washington, D.C. The experimental treatment,
prokineticin 2, is a recently discovered signaling molecule that
occurs naturally in the part of the brain that helps control
hunger. Both lean and obese mice treated with PK2 for 5 days
lost almost 5 percent of their body weight, the authors
reported. "This is a greater weight loss than people achieve
with current nonsurgical weight loss therapies," said study co-
author Waljit Dhillo, a clinical senior lecturer at Imperial
College London. The researchers first dissolved a commercially
available form of PK2 (from PeproTech Ltd.) in saline and
injected it into the brain of 12 rats, which were allowed to eat
as much as they wanted for 24 hours. Compared with