{"id":539372,"date":"2010-04-22T07:30:52","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T11:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=75201"},"modified":"2010-04-22T07:30:52","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T11:30:52","slug":"obesity-capsule-from-gelesis-made-to-swell-up-in-the-stomach-passes-first-human-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/539372","title":{"rendered":"Obesity Capsule From Gelesis, Made to Swell Up in the Stomach, Passes First Human Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Biotech<\/a>, obesity<\/a>, startups<\/a><\/div>\n

\t\t\"Gelesis<\/a>
\n\t\tLuke Timmerman wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There must be a million ideas to help the many millions of obese Americans lose weight. Today, doctors will get a glimpse at a first-of-its-kind treatment from Boston-based Gelesis, where scientists have created a capsule that expands in the stomach to make people feel full and eat less.<\/p>\n

Gelesis has said little about this idea since the company was founded with seed financing from Puretech Ventures, plus another $16 million<\/a> from OrbiMed Advisors, Queensland BioCapital Funds, Puretech, and others in January 2008. Now Gelesis has results from a clinical trial of 95 people who were randomly assigned to take the company’s superabsorbent hydrogel capsules (Attiva) or a placebo. The capsules helped people feel full after meals and less hungry in between, researchers said. And, importantly, the treatment was well-tolerated. The findings were presented at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists annual meeting<\/a> in Boston.<\/p>\n

Anyone following the news knows that the obesity epidemic in the U.S. has gotten so big that it poses a threat to the healthcare system, and, simultaneously, represents a monster business opportunity. Health officials now say two-thirds of U.S. adults have become overweight or obese, which raises the risk for a whole raft of other conditions like diabetes, heart attacks, and depression to name a few. Doctors often advise people to eat healthier and exercise more, without much luck. A few biotech companies are racing to win FDA approval of new drugs, but Big Pharma companies have tread cautiously in this field since the fen-phen debacle of the ’90s. Gastric bypass surgery to shrink the stomach can help people, although the procedure carries significant risks.<\/p>\n

\"Alessandro<\/a><\/p>\n

Alessandro Sannino<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The idea at Gelesis is to come at this problem with a completely new method. It’s essentially a way to reduce stomach volume without subjecting people to the invasiveness and potential complications of surgery.<\/p>\n

“For the first time a group was able to overcome the enormous technical hurdles in creating a super-absorbent polymer,” said Robert Langer, the prominent bioengineering professor at MIT, in a company statement. Langer isn’t a founder of the company, although he advised Puretech Ventures on the technology before the firm seeded Gelesis in 2006. Based on today’s results, Langer added: “This opens the door for entirely new uses of polymers in medicine.”<\/p>\n

I took a closer look at this yesterday during a conference call with three key players of Genesis. Daphne Zohar<\/a> and Eric Elenko<\/a> of Puretech Ventures, and the co-inventor of the technology, Alessandro Sannino<\/a>, a professor of engineering at the University of Sallento in Italy, who has been working on this idea for 15 years. The company also has recruited a lot of prominent advisers with different layers of expertise. James Hill, a University of Colorado professor and past president of The Obesity Society brings obesity knowledge; Allan Geliebter, a phychologist at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital is a pioneer of the gastric balloon; Lee Kaplan of Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center is a leading researcher in gastric bypass surgery. John LaMattina, a former president of Pfizer’s global R&D operation, has joined the Gelesis board.<\/p>\n

You can take a look at how this technique is supposed to work by watching this animation<\/a> on the Gelesis site<\/a>, which lasts a little less than four minutes. But’s here the concept in a nutshell: Gelesis has developed a superabsorbent polymer from some unspecified food source. This material, about the size of a grain of sugar, is designed to swell up more than 100-fold …Next Page »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Biotech, obesity, startups Luke Timmerman wrote: There must be a million ideas to help the many millions of obese Americans lose weight. Today, doctors will get a glimpse at a first-of-its-kind treatment from Boston-based Gelesis, where scientists have created a capsule that expands in the stomach to make people feel full and eat less. Gelesis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}