Brown fat research opens up possibility of obesity tablets

Keeping calorie-burning brown fat cells running throughout the day rather than allowing them to switch on and off, possibly via tablets or injections, could help our bodies cope better with a modern day abundance of food, according to researchers who are investigating the link between the body clock and obesity.

It's part of a growing field of research looking at how disruption to the body clock caused by lifestyle changes such as increased light exposure, shift work and plentiful food is contributing to problems including obesity and diabetes, and whether manipulating our internal timing could offer possible treatments.

The aCROBAT project, funded by the EU's European Research Council, is looking at how the body clock controls brown fat – a tissue that burns calories and uses up glucose from the blood to produce heat and dissipate energy in the body. The power of brown fat is tightly under the control of the body clock.

'For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors did not know when their next meal was coming. Therefore, we believe the body's clock was programmed to turn off brown fat at times of day when it wasn't needed,' said aCROBAT coordinator Dr Zachary Gerhart-Hines, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

But in societies such as Europe, where people can now eat whatever they want to, whenever they want to, this can lead to major health problems.

Dr Gerhart-Hines' research is looking at ways to switch on brown fat and to keep it working for longer, to use up more of the excess of calories and blood glucose. 'So essentially, can we keep brown fat turned on throughout the day?'

The idea is to identify pharmacological targets – enzymes or receptors – that play an essential role in how the body clock controls brown fat.

The researchers have already identified molecules both on the cell's surface and interior that modulate brown fat at different points in the day. They now hope to design strategies that can unlock these 'brake points' to keep brown fat working.

Tablets and injections

The research has already turned up some promising candidates and depending on the process, this exploration could eventually lead to a tablet or injection-based therapy for clinical treatment of obesity or diabetes.

'It's fascinating to study how we as mammals have adjusted to become maximally efficient over tens of thousands of years and how we have managed to disrupt that elegant programming in less than a few hundred years,' Dr Gerhart-Hines said.

'Now what we hope to accomplish is really to figure out how we can use pharmacology and these different tools and techniques to help people by resetting the brown fat clock to modern times,' he added.

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