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The next major medical breakthrough for weight loss could come from a snake.

Canva Pro Images. Ball Python

Alliance researchers at Stanford Medicine and the University of Colorado, Boulder, found a metabolite called pTOS that spikes a thousandfold in pythons’ blood after a large meal. The molecule caused laboratory mice to eat significantly less over 28 days, producing effects similar to semaglutide drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. The discovery came from studying the extreme feast-and-famine biology of pythons, animals that can consume an enormous meal and then go a year without eating.

It’s not the first time reptiles have pointed scientists toward a medicine. Semaglutide itself arose from a hormone discovered in the Gila monster. While it’s too early to know whether pTOS will work in humans, the research is part of a broader effort to study the animal kingdom’s most extreme physiologies for molecules that could reshape human medicine.

The study is published in Nature Metabolism.

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This work is part of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance Molecular Athlete Moonshot.

Authors include Shuke Xiao, Mengjie Wang, Thomas Martin, Barry Scott, Xing Fang, Xinming Liu, Yongjie Yang, Sipei Fu, Steven Truong, Jack Gugel, Gregory Maas, Marcus Mullen, Jennifer Hampton Hill, Veronica Li, Andrew Markhard, Mingming Zhao, Wei Qi, Saranya Reghupaty, Meng Zhao, Jan Spaas, Wei Wei, Trine Moholdt, John Hawley, Christian Voldstedlund, Erik Richter, Xiaoke Chen, Katrin Svensson, Daniel Bernstein, Leslie Leinwand, Yong Xu, and Jonathan Long