A UMass Medical School researcher has obtained a $2-million grant to study how fat cells differ in people with and without type 2 diabetes.
The funding from the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which the Worcester school announced Wednesday, is slated to last four years to allow Dr. Silvia Corvera to learn more about what causes diabetes and related conditions, including fatty liver and cardiovascular disease.
Corvera, a professor of molecular medicine, plans to take fat tissue from patients and implant them in mice, where they will make new fat tissue. The mice will be studied to see if the newly formed fat is different depending on where the cells came from in the body, or whether they came from patients with diabetes, she said.
The idea of the research is to find how different fat deposits form and if they vary between people with type 2 diabetes, which can be hereditary, and those without it.
