Unravelling the molecular signalling underlying human brown adipogenesis

Obesity and associated diseases are one of the most critical unsolved health problems and its prevalence keeps growing at an alarming rate. Despite intense research, most of the available non-invasive treatments are ineffective in the long term and the best therapeutic option is still bariatric surgery. The activation of the brown adipose tissue, an energy-dissipating organ, is a promising strategy to treat obesity. However, obese people have less brown adipose tissue and more information is needed to know how to improve its generation and activation using drugs. I will use a multidimensional approach to characterise the signalling pathways and key molecules in each differentiation step using human stem cells differentiated into brown adipose tissue. These data will help to find new drug targets to improve brown adipose tissue activation in obese patients and will also provide information to classify patients according to the functional state of their brown fat.