Dr. Salvatore Modica

Research area

The maintenance of our body weight over decades is determined by a system able to precisely match food intake with energy expenditure. To this end, two tissues have been selected by nature: white adipose tissue (WAT), which stores excess energy in form of fat, and brown adipose tissue (BAT), which burns fat to generate heat as a defense against hypothermia and energy overload. Unlike for other mammalians, the presence of BAT in adult humans was doubted until very recently, when using PET-CT it was clearly demonstrated that also adult humans have important depots of functional BAT. Moreover, besides to dedicated area in our body, brown fat cells are also found interspersed within WAT depots as a result of white-to-brown trans-differentiation. Thus, to increase energy expenditure as heat by promoting recruitment and activation of BAT may be beneficial to counteract the epidemic of obesity, which is driving a public health crisis because of its clinical complications such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. All current available pharmacological interventions against obesity act at the energy-intake side of the energy balance equation and result in only moderate, often temporary improvements. My research, then, is addressed to undercover the molecular mechanisms regulating both brown fat cell development and function as well as white-to-brown trans-differentiation.