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Earlier this year, a team from UC San Francisco reported on the discovery that a class of commonly prescribed type-2 diabetes drugs, called TZDs (thiazolidinediones, such as Actos and Avandia), promoted the conversion of energy-storing white fat cells into energy-burning brown fat cells. Now researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have identified the mechanism that causes this change to take place, potentially leading to new treatments for obesity and type-2 diabetes.
While it was known that TZDs have the ability to change white fat cells to brown fat cells by activating a cell receptor called peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor–gamma (ppar-gamma), the exact mechanism behind this transformation was unclear. Because TZDs have numerous adverse side effects,
