Fat Chance: Cancer drugs may also thwart obesity
By John Travis
A promising class of anticancer-drug candidates, which work by depriving growing tumors of needed blood vessels, also prevent obesity or cause dramatic weight loss in rodents. This discovery rests upon the unappreciated fact that fat tissue, like a tumor, requires an increased blood supply to grow, says Maria A. Rupnick of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the study on the drugs.
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“It’s clearly a potential way to think about treating obesity,” says Marc L. Reitman, director of obesity research at Merck Research Laboratories in Rahway, N.J. “I think the paper is very interesting, novel, and provocative.”