The Viagra for Obesity?
Bookmark this post for the future. The following fascinating article on P57 was published in the newspaper The Day on 2/14/99. The Day is the local paper in New London Conn. near the home of PFE's Groton Research.The author Steven Slosberg was kind enough to email me a copy.
BigKNY3
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Obesity, the nation's other oral fixation, is a perennial feeding ground for all manner of entrepreneurs, especially, in the interest of health, happiness and shareholders, drug companies. Pfizer Inc.'s commitment to weight loss gets scant mention in the Feb. 15 issue of U.S. News & World Report. The principal story is about lawsuits resulting from deaths attributed to such diet drugs as fen-phen and the removal of dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine from the world market in late 1997.
In a side piece about the rush to find a miracle - that is, safe and effective - diet drug, Pfizer is said to be "in the early stages of testing drugs to block neuropeptide Y, a powerful eating signal."
But there is more to Pfizer's embrace of obesity, particularly a multicontinent endeavor to develop and market an appetite suppressant involving the pharmaceutical giant's Groton research and development headquarters, a British company specializing in botanical medicine and, in essence, the government of South Africa.
The hype, from the outset, has been keyed to the tune of "billions in botanicals," at least on the British and South African fronts.
Pfizer, at this stage, is more circumspect about the prospects of what it calls P57, an appetite suppressant derived from the extract of a succulent plant found in arid areas of South Africa. According to legend, the plant is chewed or eaten by bushmen on extended hunting trips to deaden the pangs of food deprivation.
Phytopharm PLC, based in Cambridge, England, signed a licensing agreement with Pfizer last summer to develop and commercialize P57. At the time, the British company was giddy about the plant's future: "The potential U.S. market for prescription pharmaceuticals to treat obesity is estimated to be worth in excess of $3 billion," said the company.
Initially, Phytopharm had entered into a partnership with South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) - the equivalent of this country's National Institutes of Health - to develop the plant as a diet drug. With Phytopharm and Pfizer in the mix, the CSIR had this to say about potential benefits for South Africa: "First commercial sales of the product are forecasted for 2003 and the project royalty income at that time, although difficult to quantify today, is expected to amount of hundreds of millions of Rand per annum for the lifetime of the patent."
"It's sort of like the Viagra story," said Dr. Richard Dixey, CEO of Phytopharm from his office in England earlier this month. "The plant was originally looked at as a treatment for stomach ulcer. The traditional use was for stomach pain."We haven't seen any side effects that seem significant, but we've only looked at a small number of humans. We're in Phase I. Problems tend to emerge in Phase III. What's encouraging, however, is that the stuff is working. It's working and not by being toxic. When animals stop taking it, they eat normally and grow normally. We're looking for something that is truly binding to the appetite center of the brain, and that's a bit like Xanadu. No one's found it."
Jasjit Bindra heads up what Pfizer calls its "naturaceuticals" strategy team in Groton, designed to cultivate natural remedies and, through science, produce effective drugs. "We take the historical use, the folklore, and then develop them as pharmaceuticals," said Bindra last week.
Regarding the appetite suppressant, Bindra said it is at the stage of proving the concept in clinical trials. "So far, we haven't seen any toxicity," he said. Barbara Hirsch, who writes a newsletter and maintains a website about obesity and attendant research from Alexandria, Va., says it is too early to be optimistic: "They still don't know what neurotransmitters it works on … They still don't know how it works." But if it works, and if it's safe, what a bonanza in this botanical, and what a fix. |
