Science Market Update

Anyone who's ever pulled an all-nighter to finish a project knows how it wreaks havoc with your metabolism. The fact is, it's not just a nicety to be awake and active during the day and sleep at night: it's the way bodies are hard-wired. Scientists have long-suspected that upsets in a person's biological clock could play a factor in the development of metabolic disorders like diabetes. Now a team of researchers from three Southern California universities has made surprising discoveries that support that hypothesis. Not only have they isolated the protein that regulates the biologic clock (and named it cryptochrome), but they have found a molecule called KL001 that dictates when cryptochrome gets sent to the proteasome recycling bin. Which is to say, they now know a lot more about this complex circadian system that not only tells the body when to sleep and wake, but also how the body should manage glucose levels in those periods of relative activity and dormancy. The bio research study was published in the July 13 advance online issue of the journal Science.

If you watch the evening news in Northern California, it's not unusual to hear the results of studies being done at Sacramento's UC Davis Medical Center campus, especially if those results are raising eyebrows. But an autism study out of the M.I.N.D. Institute at UCDMC has gone national recently, appearing on dozens of media outlets, as well as in Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics.  The news? Research study results showing a corellation between a mother's obesity during pregnancy and increased risk for autism in her child. More specifically, women with metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension were 1.6 times more likely to have children with autism spectrum disorders than healthy women.

There is still no magic pill for the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight, but research into the cellular mechanism of fat production is turning up promising avenues for therapeutics that are closer than you might think.  We mentioned "good brown fat" in a recent article on hormone research at Harvard.  Scientists in the Diabetes Center and the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of California San Francisco, Parnassus Campus, are also looking at brown fat production as a treatment for obesity. 

Thanks to a longtime Minnesota philanthropist and the State of Minnesota, neuroscience and diabetes researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic are looking at millions in research grant funding from two new programs:

• The Wallin Discovery Fund for neuroscience at UMinn ($500K/yr.)
• The Decade of Discovery Program for diabetes research at UMinn and the Mayo Clinic ($1.86M)

Minnesotans are already familiar with the generosity of the late Win Wallin, formerly of Pillsbury and Medtronic, whose name is on a new Medical Biosciences Building in the Minneapolis Biomedical Discovery District (on the Twin Cities campus), and whose scholarship program has sent promising urban students to college at UMinn for two decades.  Now, in his honor, a new grant program has been announced by the Wallin charity to provide $500,000 a year in funding for bold research in neuroscience at the University.  UMinn recommended neuroscience as the best candidate field for the new grant program, which will provide support to bridge the gap between seed funding and result demonstration sufficient to draw NIH grants.