Injectable medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have made headlines this year for their ability to induce feelings of fullness and accelerate weight loss. But what if there was a way to curb your cravings without having to stick a needle in your belly or suffer those two drugs' widely reported gastrointestinal side effects?
MIT engineers may have invented just that.
In a recent study published in the journal Science Advances, the MIT researchers revealed a new potential weight-loss treatment that is ingestible and tricks the brain into thinking it's full.
"The development of new non-invasive methods for treating obesity is of importance in confronting the multifaceted challenges posed by this global health crisis," said the paper's lead author, Shriya Srinivasan, a former MIT graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard.
"Traditional interventions, such as invasive surgeries, can be associated with significant risks, costs and lifestyle modifications, limiting their applicability and effectiveness," Srinivasan told Newsweek.
"Non-invasive methods for treating obesity offer alternatives to invasive procedures, reducing associated risks and costs while improving accessibility for a broader population," she said.
To attain this goal, Srinivasan decided to take advantage of the body's hunger-signaling systems.
"The sensation of satiety, the cessation of desire to eat after a meal, arises from a complex interplay between physical and neural mechanisms," said the paper's senior author, Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
"The primary physical driver is the [expansion] of the stomach caused by ingested food," he told Newsweek.
As the stomach expands, receptors in its walls become activated and send a signal to the brain to tell it to stop eating. "These signals are interpreted as a sense of fullness, leading to the suppression of hunger and the initiation of behaviors associated with meal termination," Traverso said.
But what if it was possible to trigger this signaling pathway without the stomach being full?
Previous research has shown that applying vibrations to the muscles in our limbs can trick them into thinking they have been stretched.
Srinivasan said, "I wondered if we could activate stretch receptors in the stomach by vibrating them [in the same way] and having them perceive that the entire stomach has been expanded, to create an illusory sense of distension that could modulate hormones and eating patterns."
To test this theory, the team created a small, ingestible capsule that would vibrate once it had entered the stomach. The pill was given to a group of pigs 20 minutes before a meal, over the course of 108 meals in total.
Vibrations lasted for 30 minutes before the device passed through the rest of the gastrointestinal tract, as any other food item would, eventually coming out the other end. "The effects are transient, meaning immediately following the administration of the device," Traverso said.
Following its analysis, the team found that taking the capsule 20 minutes before eating not only increased the levels of the pigs' satiety-signaling hormones but also reduced their food intake by 40 percent. This in turn lowered their average rate of weight gain, all without any observable side effects.
"Restriction of caloric intake during meals is a well-documented and sustainable mechanism to limit weight gain," Traverso said. "We envision the stimulation device being ingested on a relatively empty stomach 20 to 30 minutes prior to anticipated meals to trigger the desired sensation of satiety early in the meal.
"As an ingestible device, no invasive implantation or surgery is required," he continued. "Stimulation can be performed directly in the intestinal cavity with a triggered activation, making the stimulation specific to the tissue of interest."
Looking ahead, Srinivasan hopes the technology will offer a new avenue for noninvasive obesity treatment.
"We would like to continue this work, studying the effects of this treatment in longer studies and eventually translate this to humans," she said. "We are open to working with industrial partners to take this technology forward."
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Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
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