ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Based on years of work at the Mayo Clinic, Phenomix offers saliva-based tests that let clinicians know what subtype of obesity their patient has, to help them select the right treatment.
Because of the remarkable weight loss properties of the new drugs that act on GLP-1 receptors—for example, Wegovy (semaglutide) and Saxenda (liraglutide) from Novo Nordisk, which are approved for weight loss, and a long-list of GLP-1 drugs for type 2 diabetes, which aren’t specifically labeled for that indication—obesity is much in the public eye these days. That’s great news for humankind, not only because we now have some effective therapies for turning the tide on obesity, but because it reinforces the truth that, rather than a poor lifestyle choice or moral failing, obesity is a disease, and one that is amenable to medical intervention.
But what kind of disease is it? Two thought-leading clinicians at the Mayo Clinic spent 10 years exhaustively studying patients to learn what drives variability in obesity treatment response, discovering that there are four distinct phenotypes of obesity, mechanistically speaking.
