The past decades have witnessed the rise and fall of several, largely unsuccessful, therapeutic attempts to bring the escalating obesity pandemic to a halt. Looking back to look ahead, the field has now put its highest hopes in translating insights from how the gastrointestinal (GI) tract communicates with the brain to calibrate behavior, physiology, and metabolism. A major focus of this review is to summarize the latest advances in comprehending the neuroendocrine aspects of this so-called 'gut-brain axis' and to explore novel concepts, cutting-edge technologies, and recent paradigm-shifting experiments. These exciting insights continue to refine our understanding of gut-brain crosstalk and are poised to promote the development of additional therapeutic avenues at the dawn of a new era of antiobesity therapeutics.
GrantsAlexander von Humboldt foundation via the Feodor Lynen Post-doctoral fellowship German Research Foundation DFG under Germany's Excellence Strategy within the framework of the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology Helmholtz Excelence Network Swedish Research Council Boehringer Ingelheim via an OpnMe project