This looks to be an interesting development, but I can’t find the masters thesis on which it is based.
Who ate all the cheese? Obesity experiment finds way to make fat mice burn more fuel
The researcher also looked at what DCA does directly to fat cells. Using a standard fat cell line grown in the laboratory, the team showed that DCA reduced the amount of fat stored inside these cells
An experimental drug that changes the way cells burn fuel helped obese mice lose body fat and, at higher doses, partially improved how their bodies handled sugar, according to a new study from the University of Alberta in Canada. The findings suggest a potential new direction for future obesity treatments that would work by rewiring metabolism rather than simply cutting appetite.
The research, Targeting Metabolic Dysregulation in Obesity: The Interplay Between Pyruvate Dehydrogenase and Weight Loss, part of a master’s thesis by Indiresh A. Mangra-Bala, focused on a small molecule called dichloroacetate, or DCA. For decades, scientists have known that DCA can push cells to burn sugar more completely in their “power stations,” the mitochondria. In this study, the question was simple but ambitious: if you force the body to use sugar differently after obesity has already developed, can you actually reduce fat and improve health?
At the heart of the work is an enzyme system called the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex, or PDH. In simple terms, PDH is like a gate that decides what happens to sugar once it enters the cell. When the gate is open, sugar is sent into the mitochondria and burned for energy. When the gate is closed, much of that sugar is diverted into other pathways that can end up as fat or as lactate in the blood. In obesity and diabetes, that metabolic gate tends to be “closed” more often than it should be, because a family of enzymes called pyruvate dehydrogenase kinases, or PDHKs, act like brakes on PDH.
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