Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) presented the 2011 Naomi Berrie Award to Barry E. Levin, MD, a University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey researcher whose work focuses on the mechanisms by which specialized metabolic-sensing neurons regulate glucose and energy homeostasis. Junior investigator Kazuhisa Watanabe, at Columbia University Medical Center, received a Berrie Fellow award.
The awards ceremony took place at the 13th annual Frontiers in Diabetes Research Conference on November 19, 2011, in the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion at Columbia University Medical Center.
For more than 25 years, Dr. Levin and his team have studied the neural regulation of glucose and energy homeostasis, using the diet-induced obese (DIO) rat as a model. In a long-term breeding project, the researchers selected rats that were susceptible or resistant to obesity when fed a highly palatable high-fat, high-sugar diet. The rats that are susceptible to obesity display a genetic resistance to the hormone leptin. Leptin plays a critical role in the development of the neural pathways that regulate glucose and energy homeostasis, as well as the control of body weight. This resistance, which predisposes the rats to become obese on high-fat diets, can be altered by changing specific factors in the perinatal environment. Levin and his team are trying to identify those factors, with the goal of developing ways to prevent childhood obesity and to minimize the leptin resistance that accompanies obesity.
Levin and his team have also found changes in the sensitivity of specific brain cells in the hypothalamus (a pea-sized region of the brain that regulates body weight, endocrine function, and temperature) to leptin, glucose, and fatty acids (FAs), as well as in the levels of ketones (by-products of the breakdown of FAs), after the DIO rats become obese. These findings may provide clues to the potential use of diet to alter the activity of neurons involved in the regulation of glucose and energy homeostasis.
"Levin's work exemplifies growing efforts to relate systemic physiology to complex genetic-environmental interactions. Obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and cancer are examples of diseases resulting from such interactions. Meticulous long-term studies have enabled Levin and his collaborators to unravel some of these relationships as they relate to obesity and diabetes, " said Rudolph L. Leibel, MD, Christopher J. Murphy Professor of Diabetes Research, co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at CUMC, and chair of the selection committee.
Kazuhisa Watanabe, PhD, the junior award recipient, is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center. Dr. Watanabe's work focuses on the molecular physiology of the gene Ildr2, cloned in the Leibel laboratory in 2008, which plays a role in islet beta cell development, body weight regulation, and control of lipoprotein production in the liver. This conjunction of phenotypes includes many of the major characteristics of the "metabolic syndrome." Understanding the biology of this gene would be likely to help in the prevention and treatment of the elements of that syndrome.
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