November 26, 2013

expert reaction to article on gene circuit to combat obesity

Nature Communications published a paper on a synthetic gene circuit that adjusts production of an appetite suppressing hormone.

Prof Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine, University of Cambridge, said:

“This is a nice trick and is elegant technology, but its likely applicability to humans in the near future is low.

“The authors have engineered cells to make an appetite suppressing hormone with the amount of hormone being produced reflecting the amount of fat circulating in the blood

“But to adapt this for human use a number of hurdles would need to be overcome. Firstly, the hormone they used is only modestly effective for weight loss in humans (much less so than in mice) so it’s not at all clear that it would cause significant weight loss, secondly one would have to find a way of safely encapsulating cells and keep them alive in a compartment in the human body in a manner that allowed them to function for long periods of time; if these are foreign cells they will be prone to rejection, if these are cells from the patient themselves then it could be  prohibitively expensive to have  engineer a bespoke cell population for each patient.”

‘Synthetic Biology: A synthetic break from fatty foods’ by Martin Fussenegger et al. published in Nature Communications on Tuesday 26th November 2013.