Researchers from the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) have discovered a technique that creates brown fat cells from stem cell cultures. This ground breaking stem cell research discovery could help create new personalised therapies for certain metabolic diseases in the future.
The human body contain two types of fat cells — brown adipocytes that burn energy while generating heat, and white adipocytes that store energy. Babies are born with high levels of brown adipocytes so they can maintain their body temperature. The number of brown adipocytes that a person has greatly decreases as they grow older.
Scientists recently discovered that brown adipocytes actually play an important role in the adult body. They encourage the body to burn up excess energy instead of storing it in white fat cells within the body. Scientists discovered that people with more brown adipocytes in their body can more easily moderate high caloric foods and regulate blood sugar levels.
The discovery that brown adipocytes worked in this way informed scientists that they may be useful for the treatment of metabolic disorders, obesity and diabetes — diseases related to the use of energy in the body and blood sugar levels.
Unfortunately, scientists had no way to generate large quantities of brown adipocytes needed to create new treatments. This latest piece of stem cell research from A*STAR solves that problem.
The technique was developed by Michael Raghunath, Cedric Badowski and co-workers at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology in conjunction with scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS). It changes mesenchymal stem cells taken from human bone marrow into brown adipocytes.
Discovering the technique was partially accidental, as Dr. Michelle Lee explains: “We wanted to determine which fat cells were present in adult bone marrow, because this hadn’t been fully investigated before. To our surprise, we found brown adipocytes present, and discovered that the bone marrow environment could trigger bmMSC differentiation into brown fat cells. We decided to emulate that environment in the laboratory.”
This latest stem cell research breakthrough could help researchers create incredible new treatments for diabetes, metabolic disorders and obesity.
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