January 30, 2012

Brown Fat Revelations May Lead to New Weight Loss Drugs

Mitch Lazar, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism, and Patrick Seale, PhD, assistant professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, are mentioned in a Popular Mechanics research round-up on brown fat. Brown fat has long been known to exist in infants and animals such as mice, but until recently, scientists thought it disappeared before human adulthood, leaving only the white fat that's associated with weight gain. Some studies confirmed that not only is brown fat common in adults, it's also important to metabolism: Younger, thinner people have more detectable brown fat. Animal studies also suggest brown fat boosts weight loss.

>> Popular Mechanics

January 19, 2012

Gender Differences in Liver Cancer Risk Explained by Small Changes in Genome, Penn Study Finds

.Men are four times more likely to develop liver cancer compared to women, a difference attributed to the sex hormones androgen and estrogen. Although this gender difference has been known for a long time, the molecular mechanisms by which estrogens prevent -- and androgens promote -- liver cancer remain unclear.

Now, new research, published in Cell from the lab of Klaus Kaestner, PhD, professor of Genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that the difference depends on which proteins the sex hormones bind next to. Specifically a group of transcriptional regulatory proteins called Foxa 1 and 2.

>> Read Press Release

January 12, 2012

Hormone May Spur New Drugs to Fight Fat

Boston scientists discovered a hormone secreted by muscles in exercise that could lead to creation of new obesity, diabetes and other drugs. “It’s a new molecule and a new pathway and a new mechanism for thinking about how to get at this very, very difficult problem of treating chronic diseases that are affecting tens of millions of people,” said Mitchell A. Lazar, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism. Lazar noted that the discovery also raises questions about the role of the hormone in the body.

>> Boston Globe Article

December 16, 2011

Walk 3 mph or Faster to Outpace the Grim Reaper, Scientists Say MSNBC.com reports that Australian researchers with a wry sense of humor say they have calculated the average walking speed of the specter of death -- and it’s about 2 miles per hour. Slow walking is probably both a marker for poor health and an alert that some things need to be changed to improve the health of a senior, said Anne Cappola, MD, ScM, associate professor of Epidemiology and Medicine in Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism and a fellow of Penn's Institute on Aging.

Researchers are looking into the theory that you can get people to live longer if you can get them moving faster, Cappola said. “People are trying things like resistance training and getting people to walk more,” she added. “That can be difficult when older people are living in confined living spaces or are afraid to go outside because of where they live. People need to walk faster,” she said. “And if they’re doing it to outrun death that works just fine.”

>> MSNBC article

December 15, 2011

2012 AACE Awards Recipient

Congratulations to Susan J. Mandel, MD, MPH for being selected by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) to receive the H. Jack Baskin, MD Endocrine Teaching.

The award will be presented at the AACE 21st Annual Scientific & Clinical Congress in Philadelphia.

>> Learn more