Elif Oral
University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
When the body cannot store fat normally, excess calories end up in the wrong places, such as the liver. This leads to high blood fats, insulin resistance, and diabetes.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Pharmacology
- Topics
familial partial lipodystrophy
tirzepatide
incretin
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Test in a randomized clinical trial whether tirzepatide, a drug that activates GLP1 and GIP gut-hormone receptors, improves body weight and fat mass in patients with familial partial lipodystrophy (FPLD).
- Measure whether tirzepatide treatment in FPLD patients reduces metabolic problems such as high blood sugar and abnormal blood lipids, and lowers inflammation in the patients' remaining fat tissue.
- Assess whether tirzepatide reduces liver fat (hepatic steatosis) and liver stiffness, a marker of fibrosis or scarring, in patients with FPLD.
- Collect safety data and patient-reported outcomes in tirzepatide-treated FPLD patients to judge whether the drug is tolerable and acceptable in this rare disease.
More about the research
In familial partial lipodystrophy (FPLD), an inherited condition, people lose fat from the limbs and from under the skin of the trunk. Fat in the face, neck, and around the organs is kept and grows larger to compensate. Patients have a markedly increased appetite, and their limited fat storage cannot keep up with what they eat. Metreleptin, a hormone replacement approved for the generalized form of lipodystrophy, may work less well in FPLD, because these patients often already have normal or high levels of leptin, a hormone made by fat cells. There is no FDA-approved therapy for FPLD in the US.
Why it matters
Patients with familial partial lipodystrophy, a rare form of diabetes caused by abnormal body fat distribution, currently have no FDA-approved treatment in the US, and their disease resists most diabetes drugs. If the trial shows that tirzepatide lowers calorie intake and improves blood sugar, blood fats, and liver fat or scarring, it could provide evidence for a new treatment option for this underserved group.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Karuna Rasineni
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Physiology
Determine how alcohol-induced ghrelin alters gut-liver communication through GLP-1, a gut hormone that regulates energy use, and whether ghrelin blocks GLP-1's effects on liver cell metabolism during alcohol-associated fatty liver.
James Hahn
George Washington University, DC·Biomedical Engineering
Develop machine learning algorithms that predict liver fat (hepatic steatosis), liver scarring (fibrosis), body fat and blood biomarkers from 3D optical body surface scans, trained and validated against liver biopsy data.
Jonathan Campbell
Duke University, NC·Physiology
Test whether pericytes, cells lining blood vessels, are the main GIP receptor (GIPR)-expressing cells in fat tissue, using mouse models that mark and lineage-trace GIPR-positive cells over time.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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