Unravelling the molecular signalling underlying human brown adipogenesis

Obesity and associated comorbidities are significant unresolved global health problems.

Despite intense research and various social policies, most of the available non-invasive treatments are ineffective in the long term, and the best therapeutic option remains highly mutilating bariatric surgery. Thus, the unmet need is to identify novel, long-term safe treatments.

The activation of the brown adipose tissue (BAT), an energy-dissipating organ, is a promising strategy to treat obesity if the challenges of accumulating enough BAT mass and optimised activity are resolved.

Since obese people do not have enough BAT, it is crucial to identify at which step of the differentiation and/or activation the BAT of obese patients fails, and whether we can pharmacologically bypass these functional bottlenecks.

Recently, Vidal-Puig's lab has optimised a unique differentiation protocol that recapitulates step-by-step the developmental path of human BAT from stem cells.

I aim to use this tool to decipher the signals regulating the process and provide an accurate stage-by-stage molecular map of human brown adipogenesis.

These data will help to infer novel pharmacologically targetable molecules to improve differentiation and activation of BAT in obese patients and provide essential information for its analysis and classification in patients based on its maturation and functional stage.