Australian scientists have for the first time grown in a laboratory “brown fat” — a wondrous tissue that burns energy to generate heat — a breakthrough which they claim could be the latest weapon in the battle against the bulge.
People tend to be fatter when they have too much “white fat” which is basically an organ of energy storage, whereas brown fat is like a heat generator. Around 50 gm of white fat stores 300 kilocalories of energy. The same amount of brown fat burns 300 kilocalories a day.
Now, a team from Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney has shown that brown fat can be grown in culture from stem cells biopsied from adults, giving hope that one day it would be possible to grow someone’s brown fat outside the body and then transplant it.
In their laboratory, the scientists, led by Dr Paul Lee and Prof. Ken Ho, successfully grew brown fat from the biopsied tissue of six patients, only two of whom had scanned positive for presence of brown fat.
“Although this is early work, it is a proof of a concept study showing that the growth of brown fat cells is possible using precursor cells taken from adult humans under appropriate stimulation.
“Regardless of whether or not someone has lots of or little brown fat, the precursor cells are universally present. Under the appropriate growth factor and hormonal stimulation, the cells all grow and differentiate into mature brown fat cells,” Dr Lee said.
Using PET-CT scans of close to 3,000 people, the team showed a striking negative correlation between brown fat and weight.
Those people with brown fat had significantly lower body mass indexes as well as lower glucose levels in the blood. — PTI