Despite Ozempic’s ultra-popularity, some patients can’t take this drug due to pre-existing health conditions such as thyroid and pancreatic disorders. Thousands of lawsuits have also been filed against the drug over safety concerns—a major one noting vision losses is currently awaiting the court’s decision.
Bioengineer Junling Guo at Sichuan University wanted to provide a safer option to help patients lose weight. His team recently developed edible fat-absorbing microbeads, shaped like boba pearls and made from chemical compounds derived from green tea and brown seaweed.1 The beads work locally in the gut rather systemically in bloodstream, which may reduce the risk of side effects. The team’s results were published in Cell Biomaterials.
“Polyphenols [the green-tea derived compound] are the ideal building block because they can form multiple interactions,” said Yue Wu, Guo’s graduate student, when she presented the team’s findings at the Fall 2025 American Chemical Society meeting. “The microbeads also interact with both fat and water, making them both stable and biocompatible.”
The researchers observed that the fat-trapping microbeads absorbed various dietary fats, from peanut butter to pork fat, with up to 81 percent efficiency in vitro. “This suggests that they can be effective in real-world cases, where fat sources are highly diverse,” Wu said. The team also found that the microbeads could reduce weight gain in rats that consumed a high-fat diet by about 17 percent relative to their counterparts who ate the same diet but without the beads. The microbead-treated rats also had significantly lower levels of fat in their bloodstream.
While semaglutide-based drugs like Ozempic work mainly by reducing appetite, other drugs, such as orlistat, limit fat absorption in the gut. This is also how Wu and Guo’s microbeads work. Orlistat is currently the only medication targeting fat absorption that’s been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. But because it hinders fat absorption by increasing their excretion through feces, diarrhea is a common side effect.
So, Wu and Guo’s team tested if their boba pearl-inspired drug could help alleviate this problem. The researchers compared the feces of rats that ate a high-fat diet supplemented with the microbeads to feces excreted by their counterparts on the same diet but treated with orlistat. They observed that rats given the microbeads had no diarrhea and excreted microbeads swollen with absorbed fats within hours. The orlistat-treated rats, on the other hand, had watery feces. These results indicate that these microbeads could help increase fat excretion without the commonly associated gastrointestinal side effect.
The researchers are currently recruiting patients, some of whom can’t take or don’t respond to semaglutide-based drugs, for an early-phase clinical trial in China to test these microbeads.
Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest: Junling Guo is the founder and CEO of Novastra Therapeutics.
- Wu Y, et al. Oral polyphenol-based microbeads with synergistic demulsification and fat locking for obesity treatment. Cell Biomater. 2025;1(3):100019.
