Bruce Spiegelman's 2012 Banting Award Lecture Highlights Irisin

摘要

Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, received the American Diabetes Association's Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement at the Association's Scientific Sessions in June 2012 (p. 1774). Over the course of >25 years, Dr. Spiegelman and his colleagues have studied various aspects of fat cell biology, including the discovery of several transcriptional components that control fat cell development: PPAR-γ, PGC1 -α, and PRDM16. The Spiegelman lab showed that unlike proinflammatory white adipose cells, brown adipose cells work to prevent obesity and diabetes, largely due to their possession of UCP1, a specialized mitochondrial protein. They also demonstrated that suppressing PRDM16 changed the fate of brown fat cells into muscle cells, and the reverse. It is against this backdrop that Dr. Spiegelman's team identified the regulatory hormone irisin, which is induced by exercise. This hormone, which is produced in muscle, was shown to change white fat into more thermogenic beige fat. Further, it induced some of the same benefits that are often seen with exercise, including improved glycemic control.