If you’re like most people, every time you step on the treadmill or sweat your way through a kickboxing class, you’re wondering — when will they develop a pill for this?
It turns out they have. Scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School have uncovered a key protein in muscle that leads to all the healthy benefits of exercise, which means it can improve blood sugar levels and melt away pounds without so much as an ounce of effort.
The problem is, the work is limited to mice.
The compound is a membrane protein in muscle cells — found both in humans and in mice — that’s broken down during exercise and secreted as a hormone. The researchers call this newly identified hormone “irisin,” named after Iris, the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology.
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Irisin acts as a chemical messenger in the body, with a “profound” impact on fat cells, according to the Boston scientists. Writing this week in the journal Nature, they say that irisin induces ordinary “white” fat cells to convert into “brown fat,” a type of adipose tissue that helps to regulate body temperature, while burning a tremendous amount of energy in the process. In people, brown fat stores are greatest in newborns, who need the extra heat generated by the burning fat cells to keep their body temperatures close to that found in their mother’s womb, at least until they acclimate to our rather chillier world. Adults have only small stores of brown fat, mostly in the back of the neck, and for years, scientists have been eager to find ways to activate or enhance this stingy deposit. The reason? In both humans and mice, as brown-fat stores increase and white-fat stores shrink following exercise, we experience ”a significant increase in total body energy expenditure,” the researchers write.
Further experiments in mice suggest that the metabolic shift can improve the body’s ability to break down glucose — and lower the risk of diabetes — while promoting weight loss. In typically understated science-speak, the researchers go on to say that, “The therapeutic potential of irisin is obvious.”
On Wednesday, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute announced that it had licensed irisin for pharmaceutical development to Ember Therapeutics. Ember is a Boston-based start-up, co-founded by Bruce Spiegelman, who runs the laboratory that isolated irisin.
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