SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) - Humans have several types of fat that all serve different functions. Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have figured out how to turn ordinary white fat cells, which store calories, into beige fat cells that burn calories to maintain body temperature.
The discovery could have a big impact on treating obesity and may open the door to developing a new class of weight-loss drugs, according to Dr. Brian Feldman, senior author of the study and cancer researcher with UCSF Health.
"It's exciting to think about the different types of fat because of their different activities. And in particular, the concept that there's fat which we usually think of as being bad that actually burns energy. So having a good property for those of us that are trying to stay fit and trim, we might want to increase these types of fat in our body," Dr. Feldman told KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart on this week's episode of "As Prescribed."
Humans have three "shades" of fat cells: white, which serve as energy reserves for the body; brown, which burn energy to release heat and maintain body temperature; and beige, which combine these characteristics.
Until now, researchers believed creating beige fat might require starting from stem cells. The UCSF study, published July 1 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation , showed that ordinary white fat cells can be converted into beige fat simply by limiting production of a protein.
"We wanted to short circuit the process and really take advantage of the fact that there are a lot of white fat cells in most of us, and then perhaps we can encourage them to become more energy burning. And so we took upon the project to try and see if there were particular proteins that we could manipulate that designated these bad fat cells and could convert the cells if we targeted them into being good fat," said Dr. Feldman. "And one of the seminal findings of the study was that we could convert an already developed fat cell from being bad to good."
Using mice, researchers were able to show that the approach works to turn white fat cells into beige ones, and that the process to do so isn't as difficult as they imagined.
"In terms of how we're going to approach this, we're going to leverage the concept that the actual fat cells themselves are fairly accessible. Alternative pathways of targeting stem cells and trying to convert them or transplant them are more difficult. And if we can actually target the mature fat cells in humans, we may not even need to take them out of the body, we may be able to target them directly," said Dr. Feldman. "And so those are the concepts that we're most excited about being able to translate to humans and help human disease."
Dr. Feldman said the discovery could have a big impact on treating obesity and developing a new class of weight-loss drugs that could have significant advantages over injectables like Ozempic and Wegovy that are aimed at suppressing appetite and blood sugar.
"We think that there's a lot of exciting payoffs that are coming through after many decades of nothing. And we think that this is going to be one of them," he said. "It's pretty hard to predict when a drug will actually come out. Our hope is that we're not talking about another decade."
Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more. You can also listen to last week's episode to hear why the first six months after a traumatic brain injury is the most critical, here .
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"As Prescribed" is sponsored by UCSF.
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