The innovative treatment is the result of a research project led by Rosalía Rodríguez, director of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and co-director of the Neurolipid Research Group. According to the researcher, "when we talk about obesity, we always only think of weight gain. However, it is a neuronal disease and the dysregulation that occurs has a metabolic impact on peripheral tissues in the body."
For this reason, after years of research into neurometabolism and the regulation of obesity, the researchers from the Department of Biomedical Sciences focused their efforts on finding a treatment that would attack the disease at its root and created a protein “with physical-chemical conditions for intranasal administration that, unlike oral administration, is direct to the brain”, they explain.
The result is Nanobesity, a 100 percent protein nanoplatform produced in the laboratory that consists of “a therapeutic part that acts on neurons in the hypothalamus, with very powerful effects on reducing appetite and increasing energy expenditure”, according to Rodríguez. Another of the great advantages of this treatment is that the benefits “are maintained over time and that, so far, it has generated neither rejection nor toxicity in the studies carried out in animal models”.
Although this treatment is initially aimed at patients with obesity, the researchers say that in the future it could also be applied to people with type 2 diabetes, a disease that can be linked to excess weight.
The project is being carried out jointly with the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with Toni Villaverde and Esther Vázquez as researchers and began in 2022 thanks to the Llavor grants from the Catalan Government's Industry of Knowledge Programme and subsequently to the Producte and Innovadors categories. After a first in vitro phase and a second in animals, the researchers are in the process of submitting the patent and will begin the regulatory study.
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