Researchers Awarded NIH Grant to Study the Role of Inflammation in Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes

BUSM Associate Professor of Microbiology Barbara Nikolajczyk, PhD, in collaboration with long-term clinical research partner Caroline M. Apovian, MD, professor of medicine and pediatrics, and Douglas Lauffenburger, PhD, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently were awarded $2.8 million from the National Institutes of Health/ National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The award will support their four-year project, “Inflammation in Human Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes,” and will allow the three-investigator team to expand studies to track over time the development of inflammation and type 2 diabetes in people with obesity, with the goal of identifying inflammatory “finger-prints” that predict disease progression.

According to Nikolajczyk, diabetes researchers increasingly have recognized the importance of inflammation in progression from obese and metabolically healthy to obese and metabolically unhealthy with type 2 diabetes. “Most current work in human type 2 diabetes inflammation has focused on molecules identified in experimental models, with the most effort spent on the sources of inflammation that were first identified 20 years ago, but not prioritized according to relative importance in disease. Clinical trials directed at these sources of inflammation identified early on have alleviated disease much less than predicted, and are not compelling clinical treatments. It is hoped that new drug targets to more effectively uncouple obesity from the devastating complication of type 2 diabetes will be discovered as a result of this new research,” she explained.