Metabolic

A conversation with Bruce M. Spiegelman, PhD

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Bruce M. Spiegelman, PhD, has been involved in several scientific discoveries throughout his career, but considers his mentoring accomplishments to be equally important.

Spiegelman, Stanley J. Korsmeyer professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the mentors he had during his doctorate had a lasting impact on him. Since then, he has tried to be a strong mentor himself to the many students and colleagues with whom he has worked in his nearly 40 years at Harvard.

Spiegelmann is the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“I have received good mentoring and I am really trying to provide good mentoring to my people,” Spiegelman told Healio. “People who have trained with me, I am proud of them and of what they have achieved. But I’ve always taken that very seriously. “

Spiegelman’s mentoring efforts were recognized when he received the Albert Renold Award 2021 at the Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association. The award is given to people who have distinguished themselves in the training and supervision of diabetes researchers and in the development of scientific communities to improve diabetes research.

Spiegelman spoke to Healio about some of his proudest accomplishments, why he believes mentoring is so important, and the future of cardiometabolic disease research.

Healio: What was the decisive moment that led you to your area of ​​expertise?

Spiegelman: I worked as a postdoc in Howard Green’s laboratory and he developed the first culture system for fat cells. I was interested in a fundamental cell biological problem, how cells differentiate. By working with fat cells, I began to understand their role in the entire metabolic system, the role of insulin and glucose uptake. It went step by step, so to speak, because I wasn’t particularly interested in the metabolic aspect at first. I developed it over the years to work on fat cell differentiation.

Healio: What’s the best career tip you’ve received?

Spiegelmann: The best career tip is to find a problem that interests you, focus on paying attention to what other people are doing but only watch with one eye. Find your own niche, separate from other people’s, if possible.

The structure of fat differentiation, the physiology of adipose tissue, the molecular aspects of it, wasn’t a very popular area when I started working on it, but I liked it. I liked the fact that not everyone was doing the same experiments as me. I have more joy and more inspiration from it. We had to do a lot of basic work that otherwise wouldn’t have been done if it was a well-trodden path. But it was also more fun doing things that were off the beaten track.

Healio: Were you ever lucky enough to witness or be involved in the making of the medical history?

Spiegelmann: My PhD supervisor Mark Kirschner and another student, Don Cleveland, discovered the protein tau, which plays an important role in Alzheimer’s disease. It wasn’t my job, it was the group I was in.

We ourselves have made some good discoveries with the role of PPAR-gamma in fat differentiation. PPAR-gamma is, so to speak, the main regulator of fat formation. My lab did that in 1994. In 1998 we discovered PGC-1 alpha, probably the most important regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis. One can argue whether these are great historical moments, but they were significant. So I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in some pretty good things.

Healio: Are you working on an interesting research?, and if so what is it?

Spiegelmann: With regard to our metabolic work, we are interested in what is known as adaptive thermogenesis, how the body adapts to different temperatures and different diets through changing metabolic rates. It has a lot to do with obesity and type 2 diabetes. We’d love to discover the basic pathways that control energy expenditure, this side of the energy balance equation, and of course we’re particularly interested in whether any of these steps can be pharmacologically manipulated to allow a change in metabolic rate, thereby improving diabetes and obesity.

The reason for the body mass you have is food intake and energy expenditure, and energy expenditure includes both physical activity and metabolic rate. Your metabolic rates are affected by a variety of factors, including temperature, your body’s genetic makeup, and your food intake. What is causing the current obesity epidemic is a combination of very tasty, high-density foods and people who don’t use as much energy because they sit around more, and most of us aren’t as physically active as our ancestors. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any metabolic pathways that could potentially be manipulated to help treat diabetes.

Healio: What was your reaction when you found out that you had received the Albert Renold Prize in 2021? the THERE ARE?

Spiegelmann: I was happy and honored because I appreciate mentoring. I see it as part of my job not just to advance science, but to teach the next generation how to be a scientist, how to be an effective scientist, how to be an ethical scientist, how to be a good mentor yourself, and promote a culture that includes anyone who has an interest in being inclusive. To treat people with respect and to share the love and joy for science and to prepare them for the next step in their careers, for scientific independence.

Healio: What do you think will have the greatest impact on your area of ​​expertise in the next 10 years?

Spiegelmann: I think it’s about understanding the basic components of human energy balance. There is no question that type 2 diabetes is a disease that has an imbalance in energy metabolism at its root – the balance between energy intake and energy output is out of whack. I would like to believe that the science we’ve been doing for the past 30 years will lead to drugs that address some of the underlying causes. Appetite control, metabolic control, diet and exercise, and education are no doubt a very important part of it, but it would actually be wonderful to have some ways to pharmacologically manipulate these pathways and systems when needed.

Type 2 diabetes is a worldwide epidemic. Laypeople are unlikely to be aware of the human and economic costs of type 2 diabetes. It’s huge. It is important for our health systems and for the health of individuals to get this under control. I have dedicated a large part of my career to this, and so have many of my colleagues. In the next 10 years it would be fantastic to find components of the energy balance system that can be manipulated pharmacologically.

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Scientific meetings of the American Diabetes Association

Scientific meetings of the American Diabetes Association

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