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With our modern lifestyles, diseases like obesity and diabetes are becoming an ever growing strain on our nation's health. Come along to our evening showcasing some of the research happening now at the LMS to tackle these issues. You can also meet some of the models helping us achieve the medicine of tomorrow.
Fighting Fat with Fat: a metabolic armour against obesity
Dr Alice Pollard
(Postdoc, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences)
The rise in availability of high-fat high sugar foods, sedentary lifestyle and strong genetic components allows obesity to run riot. However, an unlikely ally lies in the very tissue we associate with this disease, the fat cells themselves. Our research focuses on ways to transform them into warriors, armed with weaponry in the form of mitochondria to burn fat and resist obesity. In this talk we will discuss what fat really is, where it comes from and how we can reprogram this remarkable tissue to fight with us, not against us, in the war on obesity.
Flying high with the fruit fly: a small insect with huge medical potential
Dr Siamak Redhai
(Postdoc, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences)
Laura Martin-Coll
(PhD student, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences)
Our talk will take a journey into the wonderful world of fruit fly genetics, from their life-cycle and specific visual features, to how this small insect has been used extensively in medical research to better our understand of cancer biology, metabolic diseases and sleep-wake rhythms.
Nature knows best: how to build a beta-cell to cure diabetes
Eva Kane
(PhD student, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences)
Transplanting new insulin-producing cells – known as beta-cells - into diabetic patients can cure them by replacing the cells that they’ve lost. However, we don’t have a reliable cell source to meet the ever-growing demand. Stem cell technology is now paving the way for new possibilities – but it’s difficult to engineer a cell that responds to blood sugar changes and releases insulin in the same controlled manner as the beta-cells we’re born with. I study how normal embryos make their beta-cells so that we can copy their strategy to generate a new source of cells for transplantation.
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