Trial diabetes pill burns fat via muscle metabolism, avoiding Ozempic's downsides

[JohannesSweden77]

A diabetes pill that burns fat without Ozempic's drawbacks



Scientists have come up with a trial-stage pill for obesity and diabetes that behaves nothing like drugs such as Ozempic. Instead of dialling hunger down, it switches on metabolism inside skeletal muscle, which pulls blood sugar lower and steps up fat burning while muscle mass stays put. Early...

www.sciencedaily.com

 

[Chris13]

Sounds like Albuterol / Clenbuterol with better selectivity, so the side-effects are meant to be less of a problem. Interesting — whether it holds up in bigger trials is another question.

 

[Calm Logic]

The point is to steer clear of the heart overstimulation that clenbuterol causes — a drug that has claimed the lives of more than a few healthy young recreational users.

 

[thorvald]

Back in my younger years I ran clenbuterol. A week in, my hands were shaking like Parkinson's and I felt overheated, so I quit.

The on-and-off pattern ran for 6 months.

Other compounds do the job far better.

 

[Redz]

thorvald said:

Back in my younger years I ran clenbuterol. A week in, my hands were shaking like Parkinson's and I felt overheated, so I quit.

The on-and-off pattern ran for 6 months.

Other compounds do the job far better.

Agreed — that drug is nasty. My own experience with it came with brutal side effects, and it carries far more risk than people generally assume. These days there's no shortage of safer choices.

 

[HereKittyKitty]

JohannesSweden77 said:

View attachment 45



A diabetes pill that burns fat without Ozempic's drawbacks



Scientists have come up with a trial-stage pill for obesity and diabetes that behaves nothing like drugs such as Ozempic. Instead of dialling hunger down, it switches on metabolism inside skeletal muscle, which pulls blood sugar lower and steps up fat burning while muscle mass stays put. Early...

www.sciencedaily.com

Should this new drug class ever reach the market, that would be genuinely exciting.

 

[lastresort]

BAM15 was my first guess, until I recalled that it works as a mitochondrial decoupler rather than a b2 agonist. Curious what they end up calling it once it's on the market.

 

[lessthanhalf]

The paper is titled "GRK-biased adrenergic agonists for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity", and it ran in Cell in 2025 — issue 188/19, article 5142, DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.042

What it describes is a biased agonist acting on b2 receptors, and the cardiovascular burden really does look much lighter than with other b2 agonists such as the clenbuterol bodybuilders reach for. As an obesity treatment it isn't generally regarded as medically safe. Phase 1 testing in humans has already happened and went fine, so active development looks likely — probably still years away, but interesting. Longer term I'd expect treatment to lean on several drugs hitting different systems, particularly in more severe obesity, so every compound that works widens the set of options.

 

[bamagirl26]

JohannesSweden77 said:

View attachment 45



A diabetes pill that burns fat without Ozempic's drawbacks



Scientists have come up with a trial-stage pill for obesity and diabetes that behaves nothing like drugs such as Ozempic. Instead of dialling hunger down, it switches on metabolism inside skeletal muscle, which pulls blood sugar lower and steps up fat burning while muscle mass stays put. Early...

www.sciencedaily.com

Hang on — were those abs airbrushed? Sorry, the photos pulled my attention away and the study itself never got read.

 

[lastresort]

Hunting down what this medication is actually called got me nowhere. Darn

 

[Enyola]

Per this study. the label it carries is ATR-258.

 

[Atlas27]

JohannesSweden77 said:

View attachment 45



A diabetes pill that burns fat without Ozempic's drawbacks



Scientists have come up with a trial-stage pill for obesity and diabetes that behaves nothing like drugs such as Ozempic. Instead of dialling hunger down, it switches on metabolism inside skeletal muscle, which pulls blood sugar lower and steps up fat burning while muscle mass stays put. Early...

www.sciencedaily.com

Genuinely fascinating. My mother's diabetes showed up while she was carrying my younger brother, and it never went away afterwards — which is a shame. Type 2 drags so many other problems along with it, so seeing real work being put into this is encouraging. For years the answer felt like nothing more than metformin and/or insulin plus a shrug.