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Biotech / Medical : Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MLNM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Biotech Jim who wrote (121)	3/15/1998 7:00:00 PM
From: SJS	Respond to of 3044

Jim, Here's to hoping that it won't take 20 years...

To: Biotech Jim who wrote (121)	3/25/1998 11:17:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3044

BJ, Here's a Reuter's report on a paper in tomorrow's Nature : Wednesday March 25 6:39 PM EST Genetic Basis Found For Severe Obesity NEW YORK (Reuters) -- A team of French researchers has discovered a genetic defect that can lead to extreme obesity and failure to enter puberty. The defect interferes with the body's ability to respond to leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite and energy expenditure, according to the report in the March 26th issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Philippe Froguel, of the Institut Pasteur, Lille, France, and colleagues studied a family in which three sisters became severely obese within the first months of life, despite normal birthweight. The girls did not develop breasts or underarm hair, and, at ages 13.5 and 19, two of them had not menstruated. One sister died at age 19 without having menstruated. The researchers found that blood levels of leptin were twice as high in the severely obese sisters as in their parents and three of their siblings. Therefore, they decided to study the leptin receptor gene in this family. The leptin receptor is a protein that binds to leptin and influences how leptin is used by body cells. Froguel's team discovered that the three sisters had two copies of a mutation in the leptin receptor gene. As a result, the leptin receptor in these girls does not function properly, according to the research team's report. The other family members either did not have the mutation or had only one copy. In addition to regulating appetite and energy expenditure, leptin must also regulate body weight, growth and sexual maturation, Froguel and his colleagues conclude. The three sisters showed decreased levels of several hormones that help regulate growth and metabolism. "These results indicate that leptin is an important physiological regulator of several endocrine (hormonal) functions in humans," Froguel's group concludes. "The growing evidence that humans can be genetically hardwired to become severely obese should eventually lead to a more widespread realization that morbid obesity is a disease requiring further scientific research," Dr. Stephen O'Rahilly, of the University of Cambridge, UK, comments in an accompanying editorial, "rather than a failure of will-power requiring sanctimonious moral opprobrium." SOURCE: Nature (1998;392:330-331, 398-401)