Metabolic Disorders
Obesity and metabolic diseases have become some of the most pressing healthcare challenges worldwide, affecting more than one billion people and driving a growing burden of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and other chronic conditions. For those developing new therapies, the challenge extends far beyond reducing body weight. Understanding how compounds influence energy balance, glucose regulation, metabolic health, and long-term disease progression is essential for demonstrating meaningful clinical benefit.
The rapid evolution of the field, including breakthroughs in GLP-1 receptor agonists, has transformed expectations for metabolic drug development. As new mechanisms emerge and therapeutic goals expand beyond weight loss alone, developers face increasing pressure to generate translational evidence that differentiates their candidates in an increasingly competitive landscape.
To move confidently from discovery to clinical development, you need models and platforms that capture the complexity of metabolic disease while delivering data that supports confident decisions. By combining validated obesity and feeding-behavior models, advanced metabolic phenotyping, biomarker analysis, and emerging approaches such as Metabolon’s MetaboPrint™ metabolomic profiling, Transpharmation helps you understand not only whether your therapy works, but how it works and which patients may benefit most.
Models
Mice maintained on a high-fat diet develop progressive weight gain, increased adiposity, impaired glucose tolerance and insulin resistance that mirror human obesity. Validated with semaglutide in both male and female animals, the model is a platform for evaluating anti-obesity and metabolic therapies.
Acute feeding models provide a means to assess the effect of a novel chemical entity (NCE) on specific factors that may contribute to anorectic efficacy or unwanted side effects. Acute feeding tests may also assist with dose finding necessary for chronic studies.
Typically rats given access to food will display a sequence of behaviors as they feed to satiation: feed, then become active or groom, then rest. This provides the means to study the effect of an NCE on this behavioral sequence to measure specificity of any anorectic effect.
Rats are trained either to consume their daily food ration over a specific time period each day, i.e., feeding induced by deprivation, or given access to a sweetened diet in a specific location and time each day without restriction to standard food, i.e., feeding induced by palatability. This enables the administration of an NCE to be precisely timed to feeding.
Read the full description: Palatability/Deprivation-Induced Feeding
NCEs may reduce feeding behavior by non-specific means such as malaise. Transpharmation offers a variety of techniques to study malaise in rats, including measurement of pica, certain spontaneous behaviors and conditioned behaviors such as place aversion and conditioned disgust. Nausea and vomiting are among the primary dose-limiting side effects of CNS drugs in the clinic. Certain drug classes such as PDE4 inhibitors, e.g., rolipram, are associated with induction of nausea in humans.
Example endpoints
- Blood glucose measurement
- Continuous interstitial fluid glucose measurement
- Intravenous (IVGTT) and oral (OGTT) glucose tolerance tests, and insulin sensitivity
- Body weight and body condition scoring
- Urinalysis
- Quantitative magnetic resonance (QMR), dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) or MRI
Platforms used in this area
Have a program in mind?
The metabolic disease landscape is changing faster than ever. Breakthrough obesity therapies have reshaped expectations, but they have also intensified competition and complexity for developers. As the focus shifts beyond weight loss to broader metabolic health, the need for translational evidence has never been greater. Transpharmation helps you generate the insights needed to understand mechanisms, demonstrate efficacy, and accelerate the development of next-generation metabolic therapies.