Project 4: Brown Adipose Tissue

A study to develop a novel method to image human brown adipose tissue.

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) plays a significant role in human energy homeostasis, and there has been growing interest in harnessing its energy-dissipating properties to combat diabetes and obesity. BAT activity is tightly regulated by the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The basal sympathetic tone of BAT is critical to all aspects of BAT function including browning of white adipose tissue (WAT), brown adipocyte differentiation and proliferation as well as determining the maximal thermogenic capacity of BAT. Most studies have overlooked the importance of basal, room temperature (RT) BAT activity, focusing instead on activation of BAT using cold-stimulation in part because the standard imaging modality for BAT, 18F-FDG, is unreliable at imaging RT BAT. In a close collaboration with investigators in the Yale PET center, We validated the use of 11C-MRB ((S,S)-11C-O-methylreboxetine), a highly selective PET ligand for the norepinephrine transporter (NET), for imaging human BAT under room temperature conditions.

• Hwang JJ, Yeckel C, Gallezot JD, Belfort R, Ersahim D, Goa H, Kapinos M, Nabulsi N, Huang Y, Cheng D, Carson R, Sherwin RS, Ding Y. Imaging human brown adipose tissue under room temperature conditions with 11C-MRB, a selective norepinephrine transporter PET ligand. Metabolism 2015 64(6):747-55
• Elizabeth’s paper: International J of Obesity.