„Gastro-intestinal Peptides in Obesity (GIPIO)” is a 4-year collaborative research project, funded by the European Union FP7 programme to the value of 4 million Euros, which brings together a consortium of 4 leading academic institutions and 2 small and medium enterprises. The project is coordinated by the University of Leipzig and aims to study gastro-intestinal peptides and their nutritional signals after food-intake and develop drugs against obesity based on this knowledge.

Obesity is the fastest growing health problem in the Western World. In the United States, obesity as a cause of preventable mortality (365,000 deaths in 2000) will soon overtake tobacco (435,000 deaths) and already has overtaken alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths), infectious diseases (75,000) and motor vehicle crashes (43,000). More importantly, it is also a problem in children and adolescents, and accordingly is, one of the major future health problems.

We hypothesize that the reduction of hormones/signals, released or blocked after food intake, significantly contributes to the feed-back upon food intake, and subsequently to the onset in obesity. Accordingly, the focus of this project is to better understand the contribution of gastro-intestinal peptides to the onset of obesity. It is aimed to identify the most relevant hormones or combinations of hormones, and subsequently to develop anti-obesity drugs that are based on endogenous hormone agonists or antagonists.

GIPIO is funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (Grant Agreement No. 223057) and coordinated by the University of Leipzig, Germany.