As widespread because the pristine team of weight-loss medication like Wegovy and Zepbound are, now not everybody responds to them in the similar approach.
In a pristine presentation on the Digestive Illness Time convention in Washington, Mayo Health center colleague schoolteacher of drugs Dr. Andres Acosta reported {that a} genetic check he advanced can establish which family are in all probability to reply to semaglutide (Wegovy) and which don’t seem to be.
The check, known as MyPhenome, from an organization Acosta co-founded known as Phenomix, depends on a mix of genetic and alternative components to categorize family into several types of weight achieve. Acosta known about two accumulation genes related to weight problems, and greater than 6,000 variants of those genes, to kind family who try with weight achieve into 4 divisions:
In his original presentation (the result of that have now not but been printed in a magazine), Acosta stories that the MyPhenome check for Hungry Intestine predicts with 75% accuracy who will reply to semaglutide.
“That comes with huge implications—first for the patient, because there is no more trial and error, and second, as a physician, I want to know which of my patients will respond because I am asking them to spend $1,000 a month or pay a high copay if their insurance covers the drugs,” he says. Having a greater concept of whether or not an individual will reply to medication like Wegovy may additionally relieve get entry to problems by way of steerage best the most efficient applicants towards it. “This may exchange the way in which we govern weight problems,” he says.
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The study involved a small number of patients—84 people who were overweight or obese, only some of whom had diabetes—who provided a saliva sample for the MyPhenome test for genetic analysis and also answered a questionnaire about their eating habits. Each took semaglutide for a year, and most reached the maximum dose. Because the Hungry Gut profile involves appetite, and semaglutide works by suppressing the desire to eat, Acosta found that people who fit into this category were most likely to lose the most weight on semaglutide. In the study, 51 of the 84, or about 60%, were classified as Hungry Gut.
“Patients with Hungry Gut lost 19.5% of their body mass after a year, compared to 10% for those who were Hungry Gut negative,” says Acosta. “That’s almost double the amount of weight loss. For the first time, we can identify the best responders.”
Acosta and his team say larger studies replicating these initial findings need to be completed before the test can be used more widely. For now, doctors can order the MyPhenome test for patients from Phenomix’s website and use it as another piece of information to help them and their patients decide if the drug is a good fit.
“My dream is to treat chronic diseases like obesity in the same way we treat cancer—in a very precision-based manner,” says Acosta about the next steps for the test. It’s also possible that as more next-generation weight loss drugs are approved, pharmaceutical companies may simultaneously develop screening tests to identify people who are most likely to benefit from their drugs. Insurers may also start relying on such tests in making reimbursement decisions to ensure that patients are receiving the right treatments for them.
Acosta says the possibility of the check isn’t restricted to semaglutide. For some family, one of the vital used weight-loss recoveries could also be simply as efficient, however till now, medical doctors depended on a tribulation and mistake mode of prescribing them. With extra actual techniques to indistinguishable sufferers to the recoveries that paintings for them, the entire current weight-loss medication may well be higher optimized to the proper sufferers.