This article and associated images are based on a poster originally authored by Gamila Maharani, Babiga Vallalperumal, Julia Ast, Stephanie Hatch, Philip Wu, Iwona Szczerbinska, Barak Gilboa, and Jorge Correia and presented at ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 in affiliation with Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford and Impellam Group Ltd.
This poster is being hosted on this website in its raw form, without modifications. It has not undergone peer review but has been reviewed to meet AZoNetwork's editorial quality standards. The information contained is for informational purposes only and should not be considered validated by independent peer assessment.
Introduction
- Reduced oxidative capacity in skeletal muscle is associated with insulin resistance
- Fatty acid oxidation (FAO) is reduced in obese patients
- Existing FAO quantification methods are limited in scale and poorly suited for complex genetic screens
- A high-throughput assay can aid in identifying new drug targets for these diseases
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Gamila Maharani et al., in partnership with ELRIG (UK) Ltd.
FAO & probe
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Gamila Maharani et al., in partnership with ELRIG (UK) Ltd.
Assay development
Automated workflow
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Gamila Maharani et al., in partnership with ELRIG (UK) Ltd.
Optimization
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Gamila Maharani et al., in partnership with ELRIG (UK) Ltd.
Validation
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Gamila Maharani et al., in partnership with ELRIG (UK) Ltd.
Conclusions & future work
- The quinone methide probe is functionally validated and optimized to detect and measure FAO in human skeletal muscle cells.
- We established an automated workflow that supports high-throughput screening with this assay platform.
- This innovative approach enables the high-throughput screening of genes implicated in the pathophysiology of obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D), identified through in silico computational biology and genetics analyses.
- We can systematically evaluate these candidate genes for their functional roles in FAO, creating a strong pipeline to prioritize therapeutic targets for obesity and T2D.
References
- Shohei Uchinomiya, et al. (2023). Fluorescence-Based Detection of Fatty Acid β-Oxidation in Cells and Tissues Using Quinone Methide-Releasing Probes. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 145(14), pp.8248–8260. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c02043. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c02043.
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Last Updated: Dec 12, 2025
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