New Diabetes, Weight Loss Drug?

Chinese researchers may have found the key to an oral drug that could treat both type 2 diabetes and obesity.
They are focusing on a compound called Boc5 by Ming-Wei Wang, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the National Center for Drug Screening and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China.
Boc5 is not powerful enough to become a diabetes or weight loss drug. But Wang and colleagues suggest that daughter compounds could join the latest generation of diabetes drugs, called "incretin mimetics."
The drugs help people with type 2 diabetes normalize their blood sugar, lose weight, and perhaps even gain new insulin-making cells.
To find Boc5, Wang and colleagues screened 48,160 compounds for GLP-1-like activity. Eventually, these compounds led them to the molecule now called Boc5.
The scientists tested the Boc5 drugs in a strain of mice bred with a defect that makes them overeat. "Although the observed effects point to a potential anti-diabetic, anti-obesity utility, a practical drug will likely require greater potency," Wang and colleagues conclude.