By Marisa Taylor

Looking to redeem itself after its fallout with pharmaceutical giant Merck, Nastech announced positive results Thursday for early phase trials of a nasal spray for the treatment of obesity.

The spray, dubbed PPY (3-36) was well tolerated when given to a group of 24 obese patients during a testing for variables such as food intake and appetite. The study was intended to find the most effective dose of the drug for further trials.

Nastech said that, when administered by IV, the PPY caused patients to reduce their calorie intake by 30 percent, which matches results from previous studies of PPY. The company also said that the spray “produced a statistically significant treatment effect” that varied with dose amount, and that it hopes these positive results will allow them to move into mid-phase clinical trials.

Nastech is not the first company to test obesity treatments using PPY, which is a naturally occurring hormone that is believed to inhibit food intake by triggering a feeling of fullness. For example, Amylin is moving forward toward late-phase clinical tests of pramlintide, its experimental obesity drug, in combination with hormones like PPY and leptin (see Amylin Expands Obesity Drug Trials).

But the draw of Nastech’s treatment is the potential to inhale it, which no other company has achieved with an obesity drug.

There are, however, a number of experimental and approved drugs in inhaled form that look promising—Pfizer’s inhaled insulin, Exubera, is poised to take the diabetes market by storm (see Inhale Your Medicine).

And Nastech inked a deal with Proctor and Gamble last January to develop an inhalable treatment for osteoporosis that could bring in some major milestone payments.

As far as an inhaled PPY, the outlook for Nastech was rosy when it struck up an agreement with Merck for further development of the drug, until Merck opted out last March, citing tepid results from preliminary trials.

But Thursday’s news looks positive for Nastech. Michael Higgins, an analyst for Wedbush Morgan Securities, says, “We believe intranasal PPY could compete very effectively with other potential weight loss drugs.”