Grant: Project Grant

Diabetes, which can be described as high blood sugar due to the body not being able to produce insulin, or a failure of insulin to lower blood sugar, is an enormous worldwide health issue. Currently, there are over 3 million Canadians living with diabetes, and treating these Canadians costs our healthcare system over 10 billion dollars annually. Despite our current medicines being very effective at controlling blood sugar levels in our diabetic patients, they do not reduce their increased risk of heart disease. However, recent evidence indicates that liraglutide, a drug that treats diabetes by mimicking the actions of a gut hormone known as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), decreases risk for death by heart disease in diabetic patients. The main goal of our research is to discover how the drug liraglutide reduces risk for death by heart disease in patients with diabetes. We hypothesize that liraglutide improves heart health in diabetic patients by boosting the heart's ability to burn sugar for energy. We have recently generated a unique genetically modified mouse strain in our lab, in which the ability of the heart to burn sugar for energy has been eliminated. We will carry out our plan by placing normal mice and these unique mice on a fat-enriched diet that causes diabetes. By investigating whether the drug liraglutide is able to reduce heart disease risk in normal mice and these unique mice, we will be able to determine whether liraglutide, and possibly other drugs that mimic the actions of the gut hormone GLP-1, improve heart health in patients with diabetes by boosting the heart's ability to burn sugar for energy. Therefore, our research may support liraglutide as a more preferable therapy to prescribe to diabetic patients, since this drug can improve both their high blood sugar and overall heart health.