Wendy Zuckerman

That was potentially big.

The team kept testing it.

They gave older mice MOTC and they lived longer than mice on a placebo.

Hassi's team worked out that MOTC might protect muscle by blocking the activity of a molecule that can break down muscle.

One study found that in men, having a mutated form of MOTC increased their risk of type 2 diabetes and having more visceral fat.

Another study found that type 2 diabetics with low MOTC had a higher risk of having a life-threatening cardiac event.

Hassi thought, this MOTC, there really could be something here.

So he started a company with a friend and they raised $80 million and ran a small clinical trial of MOTC.

They got people with a high BMI and quite a bit of fat around their liver, had them come into a lab.

The people were injected with either MOTC or a placebo.

And Hussey basically wanted to know, would those getting MOTC lose more weight?

Would they lose some of the fat around their liver?

And here's what happened.

When it came to weight loss and fat around the liver, the Mozi group did maybe a little better, but it wasn't statistically significant.

They did see some more exciting stuff, though.

There are these liver enzymes that tend to go up in people with fatty liver.

And it was pretty safe.

The biggest issue is that some people had a bit of skin irritation around the site of injection.

So things were going okay, and Hasi thought that maybe this really would be a drug.

In fact, he was starting to dream of larger trials with more people.