Anti-obesity drug development

Obesity accelerates morbidity and mortality and has been described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an epidemic in many industrialised nations [101,102]. Diet, exercise and lifestyle recommendations have proven to be mostly ineffective in adequately preventing or treating the progression of this public health disease. Existing drug treatment is limited by the scarce number of safe and well-tolerated drugs with proven long-term efficacy in maintaining weight loss. Numerous anti-obesity drugs in development have promise. Yet, despite that obesity is the single most common nutritional problem in many developed nations and despite the devastating health consequences of this unchecked epidemic, investigational anti-obesity drugs face unique and significant challenges due to past and current experiences with anti-obesity drugs. It is anticipated that new anti-obesity drugs for this serious, multifaceted metabolic disease will become as safe and effective and as medically accepted as the treatment of other metabolic disorders such as hypertension, dyslipidaemia or Type 2 diabetes mellitus. This may be particularly important, given that these metabolic disorders may be largely due to or exacerbated by obesity itself.