Diabetes and Obesity

Global Obesity is pandemic in nature with estimates of more than 1 billion people suffering from it in 2025. It is a serious risk-factor for developing type 2 and other co-morbidities resulting in “whole body dysfunction” and subsequent development of several diseases. The accumulated effect is a year-long reduction in quality of life for obese people with or without diabetes.

Obesity leads to an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease that eventually results in premature death and shortening of life duration. Recent advances by “Big Pharma” in the development of effective anti-obesity drugs, has proven that pharmacological weight management is possible and leads to obvious quality-of-life and longevity benefits.

Even long-term, public health costs are expected to be reduced if the clinically negative effects of the obesity pandemic are limited. This has sparked a general interest in future potential oral treatments that can meet the accessibility criteria needed to stimulate growing demand, and several acquisitions have been done in the obesity segment recently.

Diabetes is a similar spanning pandemic with strong ties to obesity, and with a staggering estimated prevalence of more than 828 million people living with diabetes corresponding to approximately 8-10% of the global adult population. Among these, its estimated that more than approximately 90 % of all diabetics suffer from type-2 diabetes, whilst approximately less than 10% suffers from type-1 diabetes.

Despite recent therapeutic advances, large and growing unmet needs exist both from efficacy, safety, and accessibility standpoints.

Our Opinion and Concept Paper on the role of TRPV1 in diabetes published in Trends in Molecular Medicine.

Read the paper here

(November 2017)

Recruitment poster from PILA PHARMAs first clinical trial PP-CT01 that was completed in November 2018