Understanding and disrupting the link between obesity and metabolic disease

Lipodystrophies are rare diseases characterised by a lack of body fat. Despite the widespread perception that ‘fat is bad’, it is an essential body organ for storing excess dietary energy. Interestingly, people with lipodystrophy are prone to an almost identical set of metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, fatty liver and heart disease, as obese people. We have long wondered why this is and recently showed that many obese people prone to metabolic disease have a subtle form of lipodystrophy. What we have learnt about rare lipodystrophies can teach us a lot about obesity-associated disease and vice versa.

We will conduct cell-based studies to advance understanding of exactly how fat cells store excess energy. This will include a study designed to relieve energy overload in people with lipodystrophy using a new very low energy diet and we will study two very recently discovered hormones of interest (GDF15 and FGF21) as potential weight-loss agents.