Obesity Cure Finally Found? Harvard & MIT Reveal New Metabolism Control Pathway

Scientists may have finally found the cure to obesity. A key gene associated with the development of obesity was recently discovered, which could help millions prevent and cure the health problem.

Since 2007, a gene called FTO has been known to be related to obesity. People with higher body mass index or BMI were found to carry a variant of the gene. Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School believe that they have found how a faulty version of FTO can lead to energy from food to become stored as fat in the body, instead of being burned, increasing the risk for obesity.

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Scientists acquired cell samples from Europeans with either a healthy or faulty version of FTO. The results showed how a faulty FTO gene activated two other genes called IRX3 and IRX5, which were known as master controllers of the process of thermogenesis, which prevent the method of how energy is converted into heat, which means that energy will instead be stored by the body as fat.

“Obesity has traditionally been seen as the result of an imbalance between the amount of food we eat and how much we exercise, but this view ignores the contribution of genetics to each individual’s metabolism,” said senior author ManolisKellis in an MIT report.

“Many studies attempted to link the FTO region with brain circuits that control appetite or propensity to exercise. Our results indicate that the obesity-associated region acts primarily in adipocyte progenitor cells in a brain-independent way,” said first author Melina Claussnitzer.

Claussnitzer added in the same MIT report that early studies of thermogenesis only focused mainly on brown fat, which has a major role in mice, but virtually nonexistent among human adults. Instead, the new pathway controls thermogenesis in the more abundant white fat stores. FTO has a genetic association with obesity which indicates that it has an effect on global energy balance among humans.

The researchers predicted that a genetic difference of only one nucleotide has a key role for the obesity link. In risk individuals, a thymine is replaced by a cytosine nucleobase, which will disturb the repression of the control region and activate IRX3 and IRX5. As a result, thermogenesis will shut down and people will accumulate more fat and become obese. The researchers further showed that there is a way to manipulate the new pathway to reverse the signatures of obesity among human and mice cells. Ultimately, there is a possible cure for obesity, Science Daily wrote.