Fighting Obesity through Pharmacology

Although there are healthier, more sustainable means for fighting obesity (such as developing healthy food habits or increasing access to healthy foods in the supermarket), the quick fix seems to draw the most attention. For example, Orexigen just closed a USD$30 million series C round of financing. Now, you may be asking (as did I) who is Orexigen?

According to the Orexigen website:

OREXIGEN™ is a privately held, California company developing a novel strategic approach to the treatment of obesity.
OREXIGEN develops and screens rational drug combinations based on the company’s proprietary understanding of how the brain controls feeding. OREXIGEN’S goal is to develop and commercialize new, proprietary combinations of currently available drugs that are designed to achieve and sustain weight loss by enhancing satiety, diminishing appetite, improving energy expenditure and minimizing the body’s efforts to compensate for weight loss.

The “strategic approach” probably has something to do with the debate about whether obesity should be classified as a disease (at least in the US). If obesity is classified as a disease, the medical and insurance establishments will have to reassess their approach in dealing with obesity.

“If we consider obesity a disease, what it really implies is that individuals have no control over what’s happening, and, therefore, as a nation and as a culture, we need to commit more of our resources to treating the complications of the weight and obesity problem rather than saying it’s a preventable event that really demands a societal response,” said Dr. Handel, vice president and chief medical officer at BlueCross BlueShield of Texas. (link)

There’s always money to be made at other peoples’ expense. It remind me of an article I read about ten years ago which talked about the looming Type II Diabetes problem, and how Bristol-Myers Squibb was aware of this issue and was preparing for it by building a new manufacturing plant dedicated to producing…insulin.

Because there’s always money to be made, it naturally becomes a political issue. What else are lobbyists for?