Gene expression in obese humans before and during treatment with rimonabant

Rimonabant was prescribed to eight patients, admitted to the Overweight Study Unit at the Department of Medicine, Karolinska University Hospital. All patients had a BMI > 35 kg/m2, were treated on clinical indications (metabolic and mechanical disability) and without mental disturbances. Blood samples were collected before treatment and at the first clinical control, when the patients had received rimonabant, 20 mg daily, for 4 weeks. Blood mononuclear cells were isolated by Ficoll separation (Ficoll-Paque PLUS, GE Healthcare). From the cell-pellet total RNA was prepared using Qiagen midi plus kit (Qiagen GmbH, Hilden Germany) as recommended by the manufacturer and was quality controlled on an Agilent Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies, Inc. Palo Alto, CA). Six pretreatment samples and seven samples obtained after rimonabant treatment passed the quality control. The cRNA synthesis for microarray experiments and the hybridizations were carried out using Affymetrix Human Gene 1.0 ST Array (Affymetrix, Inc., Santa Clara, CA) according to standard Affymetrix protocols at the core facility for Bioinformatics and Expression Analysis, Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet.