These observations, initiated a considerable effort to develop therapeutics targeted to the GDF15 system including anti-GDF15 antibodies proposed as a novel therapeutic strategy to treat cancer – induced cachexia (Gyuris, Lerner, Lin, WO2016/049470), the effort to deorphanize the GDF15 receptor (discussed section “Conclusion”) and the development of novel GDF15 analogs for the treatment of obesity and diabetes (Xiong et al., 2017). The gene discussed is GDF15; the disease is diabetes mellitus.