«We are in the process of elucidating the exact mechanism by which B2M works,» said Saul A. Villeda, PhD, a UCSF Faculty Fellow and
co-senior author of the new study.
«The idea is that when fat cells (adipocytes) interact with environmental agents — in this case, bacterial toxins — they then trigger a chronic inflammatory process,» says Patrick Schlievert, Ph.D., UI professor and head of microbiology and
co-senior author of a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Not exact matches
«Cancer therapies that attack the lipid composition
of the cell membrane would be an entirely
new class
of anticancer drugs,» says
co-senior study author Paul Beales,
of the University
of Leeds in the UK.
«This is a very large scale
study using a
new, innovative statistical method,» said
study co-senior author Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., professor
of psychiatry, and human and molecular genetics in the Virginia Commonwealth University School
of Medicine, and an internationally recognized psychiatric geneticist.
«The results position TRPV4 as a
new target for preventing and treating sunburn, and probably chronic sun damage including skin cancer or skin photo - aging, though more work must be done before TRPV4 inhibitors can become part
of the sun defense arsenal, perhaps in
new kinds
of skin cream, or to treat chronic sun damage,» said Steinhoff,
co-senior author of the
study.
«This groundbreaking
study sets the stage for more exacting research, using the latest genomic technologies and aimed at developing
new therapies that could help the tens
of thousand
of patients who urgently need our help,» said Dr. Nhan Tran, an Associate Professor
of TGen's Cancer and Cell Biology Division and the
study's other
co-senior author.
«The most exciting thing about our
study is not that we've identified a
new gene involved in pulmonary hypertension, but that we've found a drug that can «rescue» some mutations,» said
co-senior author Wendy K. Chung, MD, PhD, associate professor
of pediatrics and medicine at CUMC.
«These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,» said Noah Zaitlen, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor
of medicine and
co-senior author on the
new study.
«There is a lot more that needs to be done to determine where these findings fit within the T2D picture, but this
study opens up a
new direction in T2D research, identifying a potential
new pathway that we don't yet fully understand,» says Eric Lander, president and founding director
of the Broad and a
co-senior author of the
study.