Head – Professor Mark Febbraio
Professor Mark Febbraio and his team are at the forefront of research into the metabolic changes that leads to type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is a serious public health issue and its dramatic rise in the community is a major social and economic burden. The complications of diabetes include kidney disease, eye disease and vascular disease. Diabetes is a major factor in cardiovascular disease and the most common cause of kidney failure in the western world.
The team's research focus is on the development of drugs that will target obesity and obesity-induced inflammation. Some of these are related to mimicking the effects of exercise. As head of Baker IDI's Cellular and Molecular Metabolism laboratory, Mark conducts research into a condition known as insulin resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes. He and his team have made several important discoveries that may lead to therapeutics that target obesity and insulin resistance.
In 2000 his lab, in collaboration with Danish researchers, made the pivotal discovery that the cytokine IL-6 is synthesised and then secreted from skeletal muscle to modulate metabolic processes. In effect, they discovered that skeletal muscle is an endocrine organ capable of secreting molecules known as “myokines”. This discovery laid the foundation for work published in Nature Medicine in 2006, that showed that ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF), another member of the IL-6 family of cytokines, prevents obesity and insulin resistance. In collaboration with researchers from St Vincents Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne Australia, the group found that obesity and insulin resistance was prevented in mice that were fed a high fat diet but administered CNTF. The group is now working on designer cytokines that activate the IL-6 receptor as potential therapies to combat obesity.
In different studies, Mark’s group have identified a novel pathway that protects against, inflammation, obesity and insulin resistance. In work published early this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the group identified that a specific chaperone protein, namely heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) prevented obesity-induced insulin resistance. The group now plans to take a small molecule activator of HSP70 into human clinical trials.
Mark and his team aim to continue research that will have effects beyond the scientific community and directly improve the health of Australians and reverse the rise of lifestyle disorders by investigating the molecular basis of obesity, diabetes and related disorders.