A young Boston company thinks it has what could be a safe, effective and noninvasive way to help overweight and obese people drop those dangerous extra pounds.
Investors including PureTech Ventures and a group of prominent senior leaders from the pharmaceutical, biotech and finance sectors have just entrusted Gelesis with $12 million to continue developing its smart pill for obesity.
The oral capsule is a superabsorbent hydrogel made of two unnamed food ingredients. It’s swallowed 20 minutes before a meal with a glass of water and dissolves to release Gelesis100 particles in the stomach.
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Those particles absorb and hold water in an elaborate 3D network so that they swell and create a larger volume in the stomach when food is eaten. Gelesis thinks this will make people feel more full with less food.
The particles shrink with a drop in pH levels, which occurs when stomach acid is secreted during digestion. They reswell in the small intestine, slowing gastric emptying and the passage of sugars and fatty acids into the bloodstream. Once they reach the large intestine, the particles degrade, release the water and are excreted from the body.
A safety and tolerability study a few years back offered an early glimpse at how people would respond to a dose of Gelesis100, but the company will need much more rigorous testing to win FDA clearance (the capsule is considered a medical device because it acts mechanistically in the stomach and intestine).
It’s working on that now. Chief Business Officer Robert Armstrong said Gelesis has some fresh data in its hands from a larger trial which had weight loss as its endpoint. That data will be presented at the Endocrine Society meeting in Chicago next month, Armstrong said.
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Obesity is the world’s largest health problem, so fittingly there are a number of competitors developing new ways to induce weight loss. The closest to Gelesis might be Allurion Technologies, another Boston company that’s working on a hydrogel technology that swells in the stomach. While weight loss surgeries have become more common in recent years, they’re typically not an option for people who are mildly obese or just overweight. Thus, a number of less-invasive options like implants, balloons and medicines are also under development.
Armstrong said he thinks Gelesis’s device has the potential to achieve the efficacy/safety balance that’s lacking with the existing interventions for obesity.
This is a non-systemically-absorbed device, so we avoid many of the safety issues that might come through other means of administration,” he said. “We believe we’ve created an optimal device that has multiple mechanisms that can address satiety and hunger.”
Armstrong is the former VP of global external R&D at Eli Lilly & Co. and recently joined the Boston-based device company, which was founded in 2008 by PureTech Ventures and Israel R&D company ExoTech Bio Solutions.
Including the new funding, the company has raised $42 million from investors.
[Image credit: Gelesis]
