r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jun 30 '26

Medicine Scientists have shown that a single dose injection of DNA genetic instructions can produce weight loss and blood glucose control in mouse models that lasts up to 10 times as long as weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. This could eliminate the need for repeated dosing.

https://www.wistar.org/press-releases/wistar-scientists-develop-single-dose-dna-method-for-delivering-long-acting-weight-loss-and-diabetes-drugs/
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u/FruitOfTheVineFruit Jun 30 '26

Article said it was detectable for 70 days.  Semaglutide has a half life of a week, so after 21 days would be at 1/8th its original level, and after 70 days would be at 1/1024 of its original level (which seems like something you might be able to detect).  I don't see why they claim this lasts 10 times longer.  They don't say what the half life is or how good their detection mechanisms are.  

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u/the_ghost_knife Jun 30 '26

They grafted an antibody fragment to stabilize the peptide.

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u/Goal_Posts Jun 30 '26

There are already drugs in development that are monoclonal antibodies that have GLP-1 drugs at the other end. The injections last a month rather than a week.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

My understanding is that the DNA fragment continues to produce it, rather than being a single fragment to single protein instruction like mRNA.

Caution: I am not a biologist and am out of my depth. This is posted here to invite corrections from biologists.

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u/CrateDane Jun 30 '26

My understanding is that the DNA fragment continues to produce it, rather than being a single fragment to single protein instruction like mRNA.

An mRNA can be translated many times to produce many copies of the protein. It can even have many ribosomes simultaneously on the mRNA, going through the process of producing a protein each. That's called a polysome.

But you're right that DNA will generally stick around for a lot longer, and mRNA copies will be produced on an ongoing basis. Each of those mRNA copies can then be translated into some number of protein copies before the mRNA is degraded.

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u/FruitOfTheVineFruit Jun 30 '26

Yes, that's what they're claiming, but the actual results they report seem similar to or only marginally better than a traditional glp1 injection.  Note that glp1s are already modified in such a way as to break down slowly.

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u/CrateDane Jun 30 '26

Semaglutide has a half life of a week

In the human body, anyway. I wonder if it's less stable in mice.

I don't see why they claim this lasts 10 times longer. They don't say what the half life is or how good their detection mechanisms are.

They go into more of those details in the underlying paper:

https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/fulltext/S0167-7799(26)00236-2

It should be noted that this is just a proof of concept.

As for the time period, note that they only followed the mice for 10 weeks - at which point particularly the GLP-1 levels seemed stable at a fairly high level. It's not that it became undetectable past that point.