Obesity drugs and their targets: correlation of mouse knockout phenotypes with drug effects in vivo

Sequencing of the human genome has yielded thousands of potential drug targets. The difficulty now is in determining which targets have real therapeutic value and should be the focus of a drug discovery effort. The available evidence suggests that knockout technology can be used prospectively to identify targets that are amenable to drug development for the treatment of a variety of diseases. This review compares the knockout phenotypes of 21 potential obesity targets with the effects of therapeutics designed for those targets on rodents and, when data were available, on humans. The phenotypes of obesity target knockouts model the effects seen when therapeutics designed for those obesity targets are delivered to rodents; of the 21 obesity targets reviewed, 16 showed a correspondence between knockout phenotype and drug effect in mice and/or rats. This suggests that, at least in terms of evaluating obesity targets, it is rare for compensatory developmental changes caused by the gene knockout to prevent detection of the relevant phenotype. In the majority of cases, the knockout phenotypes also modelled the effects seen when the relevant therapeutics were delivered to humans. Thus, it seems rational to use mouse knockout technology prospectively to identify genes that regulate body fat in vivo, and then to develop anti-obesity therapeutics by targeting the human protein products of these genes. Ultimately, the value of using this approach to identify novel targets for human anti-obesity therapies will be judged by future studies examining the anti-obesity effect, in humans, of the therapeutics that result from this approach.