UT Southwestern’s obesity research receives $22 million grant

by PegNews wire

That's nearly 600,000 delicious Happy Meals.

DALLAS — UT Southwestern Medical Center’s obesity research team has received a $22 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to enhance its groundbreaking efforts to attack obesity from every angle, from studying fat cells to developing medicines.

The award, formally announced today, is one of nine interdisciplinary research consortia sponsored by the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. These groups seek to solve difficult problems by blending approaches from multiple biomedical research disciplines. UT Southwestern’s group is the only one focused on obesity.

“This extends and strengthens our task force’s ability to conduct studies to gain much-needed insight into the key molecular pathways that govern energy metabolism and translate that into the development of new approaches to prevent obesity and treat associated metabolic complications, such as heart disease and diabetes,” said Dr. Jay Horton, associate professor of internal medicine and molecular genetics and the grant’s coordinating investigator.

The grant comes at a time when waistlines are bulging. Two-thirds of adults in America are overweight or obese, raising their risk of developing health maladies including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, fatty liver disease and others.

The UT Southwestern group comprises 29 scientists from different backgrounds, including genetics, endocrinology, nutrition, neurology, lipid metabolism, psychiatry and epidemiology — a combination aimed at better understanding the processes that lead to obesity and associated metabolic disorders, said Dr. Horton.

Source: UT Southwestern