Pharmacotherapy for obesity: a field in crisis?

Abstract

Despite the requirement for effective and safe pharmacotherapies to tackle the obesity epidemic, there is currently only one drug, orlistat, licensed for this purpose, but the effectiveness of this drug falls far short of the medical needs. Recent advances in the understanding of energy balance control have highlighted a number of new biological targets for the treatment of obesity. Some pharmacological approaches for bodyweight loss have yielded promising results in clinical trials. However, finding the correct balance between efficacy and safety has proven challenging. Given the high unmet need and our growing understanding of the complexity of bodyweight homeostasis, novel, more efficacious and better tolerated treatments for obesity are clearly required. In this article, we provide an overview of currently available anti-obesity agents, the reasons for the failure of a number of recent drug candidates and discuss future strategies for pharmacological interventions to treat obesity.

Keywords::

• analog
• anorectic
• anti-obesity drugs
• GLP-1
• gut hormones
• obesity

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The Section of Metabolic Medicine is funded by grants from the Medical Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), an Integrative Mammalian Biology Capacity Building Award and an FP7-HEALTH-2009-241592 EuroCHIP grant, and is supported by the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre Funding Scheme. Wiebke Fenske is also funded by the German Research Society for a research fellowship. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.