Treatment of Obesity with Celastrol

By Junli Liu, Jaemin Lee, Mario Andrés Salazar Hernández, Ralph Mazitschek, U. Ozcan. Cell, 2015

671 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY Despite all modern advances in medicine, an effective drug treatment of obesity has not been found yet. Discovery of leptin two decades ago created hopes for treatment of obesity. However, development of leptin resistance has been a big obstacle, mitigating a leptin-centric treatment of obesity. Here, by using in silico drug screening methods we discovered that Celastrol, a pentacyclic triterpene extracted from the roots of Tripterygium Wilfordi (Thunder of God Vine) plant, is a powerful anti-obesity agent. Celastrol suppresses food intake, blocks reduction of energy expenditure and leads up to 45% weight loss in hyperleptinemic diet-induced obese (DIO) mice by increasing leptin sensitivity, but is ineffective in leptin-deficient (ob/ob) or leptin receptor-deficient (db/db) mouse models. These results indicate that Celastrol is a leptin sensitizer and a promising agent for the pharmacological treatment of obesity.

Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Complementary and alternative medicine, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ef34d46af0dade12628d6e740f1cdfb8db21bbf

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1. Shuangsang Fang
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5. Lianhe Zhao
6. Yang Wu
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8. Dechao Bu

Citations in the corpus

• HERB: a high-throughput experiment- and reference-guided database of traditional Chinese medicine (2020, background): “For example, researchers recently identified a compound, celastrol, which acts as a leptin sensitizer to treat obesity, by mapping the gene expression profile of celastrol to that of reduced endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, a condition tightly linked to obesity (6).”