(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays)
By Nancy Lapid
July 23 (Reuters) – We also report on new insights into the skin-discoloring disorder vitiligo that may someday lead to corrective treatments.
EXPERIMENTAL GLP-1 COMBO DRUG PROMPTLY IMPROVES FATTY LIVER DAMAGE
Combining an investigational GLP-1 obesity drug with another type of experimental drug yielded dramatic improvements in fatty liver disease in a mid-stage study, with signs of improvement evident as early as 12 weeks after starting treatment, researchers say.
The once-weekly combo drug from D&D Pharmatech combines the company’s experimental GLP-1 drug zabopegdutide with its experimental drug TLY012, which is designed to induce the death of damaged cells.
Participants in the trial were overweight or obese, with biopsy-proven fatty liver disease.
After 48 weeks of treatment, biopsies showed that patients randomly assigned to receive the new combo drug had significantly more reductions in liver fat and improvements in liver damage compared to patients who received a placebo, researchers had previously announced.
This week in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the researchers reported that the meaningful microscopic improvements in liver tissue they saw at 48 weeks on the biopsy samples were associated with clinically meaningful improvements in certain blood tests that were already evident after only 12 weeks.
“Many of these benefits occurred before meaningful weight loss, suggesting that zabopegdutide provides direct therapeutic effects on the liver beyond weight reduction,” D&D President and CEO Seulki Lee said in a statement.
Even among patients who had lost less than 5% of their body weight by week 12, zabopegdutide still produced significant reductions in liver fat and liver stiffness, the researchers reported.
PIGMENT-PRODUCING CELLS MAY BE REACTIVATED IN WHITE SKIN PATCHES
In white patches of skin caused by vitiligo — an autoimmune condition that causes skin to lose its color — pigment-producing cells have not completely disappeared, Japanese researchers have found.
Instead, the pigment-producing cells have entered a state in which the mature cells revert to a more primitive form, losing many of their specialized functions, including the production of pigment, the researchers reported in Nature Communications.
“This study uncovers a new mechanism underlying the development of vitiligo, which could change how we treat the disease,” study leader Dr. Lingli Yang of Osaka University said in a statement.
Melanocytes — the pigment-producing cells — are located on a thin membrane that provides instructions to help them remain functional.
Typically, the melanocytes bind to this so-called basement membrane via a protein called laminin-211, but in vitiligo patients, the membrane has a higher concentration of a different protein, laminin-332.
Because their preferred binding protein is no longer available, melanocytes change how they attach – and the changes activate pathways that ultimately result in the melanocytes regressing to a non-pigment-producing state.
In experiments in mice and in samples of human skin, when the researchers used drugs to target these pathways, they were able to reactivate mature melanocytes and pigmentation-related genes and reverse many features of the dormant cells.
“This was an exciting discovery for us, as most current treatments largely focus on suppressing autoimmune attacks and reducing inflammation,” study coauthor Professor Ichiro Katayama, also of Osaka University, said in a statement.
“New treatment avenues such as reactivating existing cells or restoring their normal attachment to the basement membrane may be possible.”
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(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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