ERC grant funds research to support weight loss maintenance

In Denmark alone, the number of people who are overweight or severely overweight has increased significantly over the past 10 years, and today, more than half of the population are overweight.

But the problem is not unique to Denmark. Obesity is a growing global health challenge with serious public health implications. Even though there are various methods for effective weight loss, a lot of people have difficulty maintaining weight loss in the long term.

“Any weight loss – whether based on diet, surgery or medication – will face the body’s natural defence mechanism. Throughout evolution, these mechanisms have ensured our survival by protecting the body’s energy reserves. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to maintain weight loss, because the brain thinks you are starving,” says Associate Professor Christoffer Clemmensen from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) at the University of Copenhagen.

He has received an ERC Consolidator Grant for a project that aims to overcome that very obstacle by developing a new therapeutic approach that target the brain cells that regulate hunger and weight.

“When the body is deprived of food, certain nerve cells become more active, which leads to increased appetite and weight gain. A drug that targets these cells mayhelp terminate this process and support people in maintaining weight loss,” Christoffer Clemmensen explains and adds:

“We have developed a strategy for suppressing these signals to make the brain stop considering weight loss a problem that needs to be fixed. This way, we believe can change the amount of energy the brain thinks the body needs.”

Teamwork

The EUR-2 million grant will fund Christoffer Clemmensen’s research at CBMR for the next five years.

Christoffer Clemmensen considers the grant a huge acknowledgement of the project and his team.

“It is a great honour to receive this grant from the European Research Council. It is not just an acknowledgement of an interesting idea, but also of the work we have done over the past many years. Even though the grant is awarded to an individual researcher, it would not have been possible without the collective efforts of lab members and our collaborators,” he stresses.

The grant enables Christoffer Clemmensen and his team to take the first important step towards designing a new therapeutic approach that can help people maintain weight loss – and thus help overcome a growing global health challenge.