Pharma Blog Watch

Sirtris' Experimental Obesity Drug (Pharma's Cutting Edge)
In his blog, Fred Cohen writes about results of a preclinical study of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals' resveratrol recently published in Nature. "In a nutshell, resveratrol appeared able to prevent many of the deleterious effects of over-eating/obesity and extended the lives of obese mice."

"First of all, I don't think any line of research today interests me more. For as long as I've been in the biz, I've thought that the holy grail of obesity research is a therapeutic that ameliorates the effects of fat accumulation on cardiovascular risk," he writes. "But besides that I wanted to echo some of the cautious remarks being made in response to it. It's not that I think the research is invalid; it's that I think it's too early to risk taking high doses of resveratrol until more is known about it from human studies, which are recently under way in cancer patients and diabetics."