1) Clinical phenotyping of obese patients to identify those that would benefit from existing therapies such as Rimonabant.

2) Discover biomarkers for subsets of obese patients that may correlate with therapeutical outcomes. These biomarkers will be discovered by a novel approach called Combinatorial Cytomic Biomarkers developed by Vivia Biotech, applied to cells from two physiologically interlinked sources: blood and abdominal-fat samples, extracted from the above phenotyped patients.

3) Identify new indications of existing drugs, alone or in combination, with potential anti-obesity efficacy by lowering the fat content and the glucose uptake of abdominal fat cells, which would be expected to improve carbohydrate/lipid metabolism and lower body weight, extracted from the above phenotyped patients. This will be accomplished by screening approximately 2.000 known drugs against these fat cells using the novel technology platform “ExviTech” from Vivia Biotech. Candidates would be evaluated in animal models of obesity.