Excalia™ - The Next Super Diet Pill?

For years everyone from the Federal government to the American Medical Association to your great aunt Millie have been screaming that we need to lose weight to help prevent all sorts of terrible things from happening to us. Like diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure to name a few.

So every year around New Year's Day, we decide that this is the year that we're going to get back to our college weight and start to exercise more and eat more healthy foods and so on and so on. Tens of billions of dollars get spent on gym memberships, exercise gear, diet programs, diet foods and diet pills. Tens of millions of people start the new year with the best of intentions.

And every year, by the time the SuperBowl rolls around, we are back to sitting on the easy chair, wolfing down a bag of chips and a sixpack of beer. For some unknown reason, it's just not that simple to change your lifestyle totally by taking away the things you like (food) and adding in the things you don't (exercise).

Well, how about a pill that can give you more than a 8% mean weight loss at 16 weeks, more than 9% at 24 weeks and 12% at 48 weeks? For someone weighing 200 pounds, that equates to about 24 pounds lost. Orexigen Therapeutics is working on just such a pill. Currently undergoing clinical trials, early results from Excalia™ have been promising.

Excalia™ is a combination of two drugs, zonisamide and bupropion. Both of these are approved by the FDA for other reasons and are currently on the market. Zonisamide, also known as Zonegran, is prescribed for controlling certain seizures in treating epilepsy. Bupropion is sold under the brand names Wellbutrin as an anti-depressant and Zyban as a stop smoking drug.

Orexigen™ has figured out that combining these two drugs into Excalia™ produces a weight loss effect that can continue, rather than reaching a plateau as you do with many other weight loss products. This combination of drugs seems to not only control the appetite, but also raises the metabolic rate, thereby burning more energy.

When will it be available?

Right now Excalia™ is in late Phase II clinical trials. Although the results have been impressive, there are still more trials to be done before the US Food and Drug Administration will give it's blessing. While Orexigen is not looking for patients for the clinical trials at the moment, you can keep track of them through www.clinicaltrials.gov. There is also the possibility that other countries could allow Excalia™ to be sold earlier than the United States.

More news on Excalia™ (Empatic™)