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The recent success of diabetes and weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy demonstrates the power of clinical results in a market with vast unmet need. While many have shed pounds with the help of these GLP-1 agonists, the reality is that obesity is more complex and less monolithic in the kinds of therapies and lifestyle changes that work for individual patients.
That’s why diagnostics to determine a patient’s obesity “type” would not only help physicians understand the disease more clearly but also usher in a new era of personalized medicine that reflects the innovations happening in areas such as cancer, said Mark Bagnall, CEO of obesity phenotyping startup Phenomix Sciences, which has released tests for two of the most common types of obesity.
Founded by two Mayo Clinic researchers, Phenomix has shown that phenotyping — finding the manifestations of genetic differences — for patients with obesity can make a difference in weight loss. The method has doubled the number of patients who respond to treatment and also doubled the amount of weight lost, according to the company’s published research.
“Like a lot of different areas of medicine, we’re finding that people are different — big surprise — and as a result, they respond differently to different interventions,” Bagnall said. “And 10 years of NIH-sponsored research into quantitative measures of obesity determined that 85% of patients have fundamentally four different subtypes or phenotypes of obesity.”
These four types differ mechanistically and require varying treatments for the best results, he said.
“Cancer therapy … has gotten to the point of a really granular level of understanding,” Bagnall said. “Obesity may get to that granular level eventually, and this is a breakthrough.”
After running reams of data through machine learning analysis and artificial intelligence bioinformatics systems, Phenomix developed a test that could fit into a normal doctor visit and determine which of the four types of obesity a patient has, making certain treatments more likely to help.
