Transplanted brown-fat-like cells hold promise for obesity and diabetes

Obesity is the main cause of type 2 diabetes and related chronic illnesses that together will kill more people around the globe this year than the Covid-19 coronavirus. Scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have delivered a proof of concept for a novel cell-based therapy against this dangerous condition.

The potential therapy for obesity would transplant HUMBLE (human brown-like) fat cells, human white fat cells that have been genetically modified to become similar to heat-generating brown fat cells, says Yu-Hua Tseng, PhD, a Senior Investigator in Joslin’s Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism.

Brown fat cells burn energy instead of storing energy as white fat cells do, says Tseng, senior author on a paper about the work in Science Translational Medicine . In the process, brown fat can lower excessive levels of glucose and lipids in the blood that are linked to metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

However, people who are overweight or obese tend to have less of this beneficial brown fat – a barrier that HUMBLE cells are designed to overcome, Tseng says.

She and her colleagues created the cells from human white fat cells in a progenitor stage (not yet fully developed into their final fat form). The investigators used a variant of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system to boost expression of a gene called UCP1, which triggers white fat cell progenitors to develop into brown fat-like cells.