Grant: CIHR Fellowship

In Canada and around the world, heart disease is the leading cause of death. People who are overweight or obese have a higher risk of heart disease. Therefore, we need to find new treatments for people who are overweight and have heart disease. To do this, we need to know how the heart and fat communicate with each other. The heart makes and releases factors that travel to other parts of the body, like fat tissue, to communicate important messages. When there is more fat, the heart sends more factors. We also know these factors can lower the amount of fat, but we don't know what these factors are. This research will study how the heart talks to fat and identify the factors, using cells and mice. We will isolate the factors released from heart cells and give them to fat cells to see if they reduce the amount of fat that accumulates. We will also study the factors released from the hearts of mice on a high fat diet. We will isolate the factors from mice and give them to fat cells to confirm they reduce the amount of fat. To confirm our findings, we will give the mice a drug that will prevent their hearts from producing the factors and study their weight gain. When we prevent the heart from producing these factors, the mice will gain weight. Using a method called mass spectrometry we will identify what the factors are. After identifying the factors, we can do more experiments to change the levels of the factors in mice. We will then study their weight gain to confirm our findings and the identity of the factor. This will help us create new drugs that treat both heart disease and obesity.