Good news! Sounds simple enough! Has something like this not been the holy grail of obesity research for for several decades? Is this finally a breakthrough?
"Researchers at UC San Francisco have figured out how to turn ordinary white fat cells, which store calories, into beige fat cells that burn calories to maintain body temperature.
The discovery could open the door to developing a new class of weight-loss drugs and may explain why clinical trials of related therapies have not been successful. ..."
"... Until now, researchers believed creating beige fat might require starting from stem cells. The new study ... showed that ordinary white fat cells can be converted into beige fat simply by limiting production of a protein. ..."
From the abstract:
"Healthy adipose tissue is essential for normal physiology. There are 2 broad types of adipose tissue depots: brown adipose tissue (BAT), which contains adipocytes poised to burn energy through thermogenesis, and white adipose tissue (WAT), which contains adipocytes that store lipids. However, within those types of adipose, adipocytes possess depot and cell-specific properties that have important implications. For example, the subcutaneous and visceral WAT confers divergent risk for metabolic disease. Further, within a depot, different adipocytes can have distinct properties; subcutaneous WAT can contain adipocytes with either white or brown-like (beige) adipocyte properties. However, the pathways that regulate and maintain this cell and depot-specificity are incompletely understood. Here, we found that the transcription factor KLF15 is required for maintaining white adipocyte properties selectively within the subcutaneous WAT. We revealed that deletion of Klf15 is sufficient to induce beige adipocyte properties and that KLF15’s direct regulation of Adrb1 is a critical molecular mechanism for this process. We uncovered that this activity is cell autonomous but has systemic implications in mouse models and is conserved in primary human adipose cells. Our results elucidate a pathway for depot-specific maintenance of white adipocyte properties that could enable the development of therapies for obesity and associated diseases."
Scientists Discover How to Make Ordinary Fat Cells Burn Calories (original news release) UCSF study finds that switching off a protein in white fat cells could open the door to developing a new class of weight-loss drugs.
Calorie-storing white fat cells
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