Scientists are about to find a way to cure obesity

Scientists at two famous US universities, Harvard and MIT, said they could use genetic engineering to isolate faulty DNA in the human genome to treat obesity.

Scientists at two famous US universities, Harvard and MIT, said they could use genetic engineering to isolate faulty DNA in the human genome to treat obesity. If this is successful, in the future one can find a way to cure obesity just by vaccinating vaccines, by scientists at Harvard and MIT, claiming they discovered that a small tweak in DNA can cause the body's metabolism to burn excess fat instead of letting them accumulate in the body.

Looking for ways to treat obesity

Nowadays, everyone knows that obesity is caused by eating more but less active, excess energy will be converted into fat and accumulated in the body. Researchers think that genetic factors also play an important role in how fat is used by the body for energy or for storage. People with a higher BMI than normal will have a FTO gene variant , called "obesity gene" by scientists .

Picture 1 of Scientists are about to find a way to cure obesity

According to Wikipedia: "The World Health Organization defines obesity as a condition of excessive and abnormal fat accumulation in one body area or the whole body to the extent that it affects health. Obesity is a health condition. The cause of nutrition is usually a healthy adult, proper nutrition, their weight fluctuates within a certain limit, based on BMI (body mass index) ".

Picture 2 of Scientists are about to find a way to cure obesity

Recently, Harvard researchers and MIT discovered that "obesity gene" is in the middle and "activates" two other genes (including IRX3 and IRX5), it will prevent fat being burned by the body in one too. The process is called "heat generation" . More importantly, they showed that they could cut those faulty genes with genetic engineering and replace them with healthy genes. In this way, scientists believe that they can cure, even prevent, the same obesity that we vaccinated against disease, from which people no longer worry about a high-fat diet. will cause excess fat.

Obesity therapy is called Crispr / Cas9 , scientists modify DNA in the mouse's gene by implanting a protein that converts (Cas9) their body. Obese mice were tested for significant weight loss and were not affected by a high-fat diet. They are studying to bring this therapy to apply on humans.

Knowing the underlying cause of the gene variant that causes obesity may allow us to find gene therapy as a way to treat this disease. By manipulating the gene, we can make the energy accumulation process into fat become the body's ability to burn them to create energy. Professor Manolis Kellis of MIT said.

Picture 3 of Scientists are about to find a way to cure obesity

In developed countries, for example in the UK, up to 25% of adults are obese (equivalent to 12 million people). This number of the 1970s was only 3%. It is expected that by 2030, nearly one third of adults in the UK will be obese and increase to more than 50% in 2050.

Obesity is one of the causes of human health risk, which leads to other diseases such as heart failure, stroke, diabetes and some cancers. Every year in the UK costs about 5 billion pounds to cure obesity and is expected to increase to 50 billion pounds by 2050.

Update 15 December 2018
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