Researchers Find Hormone Causes A Loss Of Weight

Researchers have discovered what they hope will be a magic bullet for obesity, or at least the forerunner of major new therapies: a hormone that makes overweight animals rapidly lose body fat. The hormone is particularly impressive because it can make even lean animals shed almost all of what little fat they have. The finding, which will be published tomorrow in three papers in the journal Science, has been greeted with great enthusiasm by scientists who see it as presenting a powerful new approach to treating obesity. They also believe that the finding will change the image of obesity, helping people to see it not as a punishment for gluttony but rather as a metabolic disorder, treatable with a remedial hormone just as diabetes is treated with insulin. Although the new studies were performed only with mice, humans are known to make a similar hormone, one so similar, the researchers report, that it was found to work perfectly in mice. This offers reason to hope that the human hormone will work in overweight people as well. Researchers cautioned that despite the excitement it was by no means certain that the new discovery would lead to an obesity treatment. And even if it does, it may take years before a drug is on the market. But they say the results seem to be a watershed in the scientific understanding of weight control, since the new hormone acts through a powerful pathway involving the brain's regulation of the body's weight and metabolism. Drug companies are already expecting a bonanza, seeing a huge market among the 50 million Americans reckoned to be overweight. The authors of two of the three articles in Science are from drug companies and one company, Amgen of Thousand Oaks, Calif., has paid Rockefeller University, whose researchers earlier isolated the obesity gene, $20 million for a patent license with an agreement to pay many times that amount if the hormone proves useful in treating fat people. Amgen's chairman and chief executive, Gordon Binder, said the company hoped to start testing the hormone in people within a year. As news of the discovery leaked out yesterday, speculators started buying Amgen's stock, raising its price by $4.375 to $84.25, a 5.5 percent gain. Science magazine lifted its embargo on the announcement, which would otherwise have required that articles about the papers not be published until tomorrow. Dr. Philip Gordon, the director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., said that in terms of weight control the discovery was "one of the most important observations that's been made in recent times." "We have to press this issue as rapidly as we can," he said. Dr. Claude Bouchard, an obesity researcher at Lavalle University in Quebec, said the papers were "very exciting" and called the hormone's effects "amazing." Dr. Albert Stunkard, an obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, called the results "fabulous." The three research teams, based at Rockefeller, Amgen and Hoffmann-La Roche of Nutley, N.J., all performed similar experiments. Their advance had its origins in work done more than three decades ago by Dr. Douglas Coleman of the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Me. Dr. Coleman was studying a strain of genetically obese mice that weighed three times as much as normal mice. Hooking together the circulation systems of an obese mouse with a normal mouse, he found that the fatter animal lost weight, as if it had received some blood-borne weight control factor from the normal mouse. But all efforts to isolate the factor failed because, as is now known, it is present in the blood stream in minuscule quantities amounting to just billionths of a gram per milliliter of blood. There the matter rested until the new techniques of DNA manipulation suggested a different method for isolating the elusive factor. The method is to search for the gene that specifies the factor's structure, and then insert the gene into bacteria, which will produce the protein product.