There's big money in fat of the landAuthor: BRAD NEWSOMEDate:...

There's big money in fat of the land
Author: BRAD NEWSOME
Date: 14/09/2006
Words: 472
Source: AGE
Publication: The Age
Section: Business
Page: 5
IT'S something of a pharmaceutical holy grail - the magic pill that will make the pounds melt away and fatten the coffers of the company that finally manages to conjure it up.

Many have thought they had found the elusive formula, but until now it seems there has always been a catch - from the problems caused by amphetamines in the bad old days, to the distinctly unpleasant rectal leakage experienced by some of those who use the fat-busting drug Xenical without taking enough fat out of their diet.

In the mid-1990s, fenfluramine was taken off the market because it could cause heart problems, and this year another weight-loss drug, Reductil, was also linked to heart problems, along with suicide and mania.

In Australia, as many as 150,000 people have used the fat-absorption inhibitor Xenical, which went from prescription-only to over the counter in 2004, despite widespread publicity about its often-distasteful side-effects.

The US Government is considering approving general sales of Alli, GlaxoSmithKline's low-dose version of Xenical.

With 62 per cent of Australian men and 45 per cent of Australian women classified as overweight or obese, the potential market is clearly huge but it is one that nobody has managed to corner yet.

"There are a few drugs but they all have side effects or safety concerns, or don't work terribly well," Roland Scollay, chief executive of the Australian company Metabolic Pharmaceuticals, said.

Dr Scollay says worldwide sales of weight-loss drugs are less than $US1 billion ($A1.33 billion) a year, but - given the potential market of a billion people - could easily reach $US25 billion if the right drugs come along.

"You could compare the market to either blood pressure or cholesterol, where people need to take (drugs) long-term," he says. "It could be tens of billions of dollars, with two or three or four billion dollars for individual drugs."

Dr Scollay says a new appetite-suppressing drug called Acomplia, developed by the French company Sanofi Aventis and recently released in Britain, looks to have great potential, but he hopes the real mould-breaker will be Metabolic's own AOD9604.

The drug, which is a variant of part of the human growth hormone molecule, acts directly on the metabolism of fat, unlike other obesity drugs that usually work to suppress appetite or inhibit the absorption of fat.

Trials have been promising, and with another major trial due to finish in December, AOD9604 could be on the market in four years.

Dr Scollay hopes the drug will start making money earlier, and the company is talking to many large and medium-sized drug companies about licensing deals that could potentially earn it tens of millions of dollars. But he cannot put a time frame on that happening.

"Big pharma deals are notoriously slow," he says.