Watt laboratory: Metabolism and Diabetes
Research Overview
View Professor Watt's latest PubMed publications listing here
Listen to Professor Watt's latest research podcast on a new type 2 diabetes treatment discover here
Listen to Professor Watt's research podcast on the relationship between prostate cancer and obesity here
Obesity, type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) are related diseases that increase morbidity and mortality and impose a significant global economic burden. Our innovative research program seeks to identify how defects of lipid metabolism and inter-tissue communication cause these obesity-related disorders, and to use this information to discover novel targets that can be transitioned to clinical therapeutics. Our inter-linked research themes are:
1. Pathogenesis of insulin resistance: understanding how insulin resistance develops in obesity.
2. Metabolic ‘cross-talk’: understanding how proteins that are secreted by NAFLD / non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) liver affect metabolism in tissues of the body, and how this contributes to the development of type 2 diabetes.
3. Regulation of lipid metabolism: identifying novel proteins that control lipid metabolism in mammalian cells, to determine how these proteins are regulated, and whether their expression is altered in metabolic diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer).
4. Prostate cancer metabolism: understanding metabolic vulnerabilities in prostate cancer with a view to therapeutic targeting.
Staff
Professor Matthew Watt, Head of Laboratory
Dr Gio Fidelito, Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Jacqueline Bayliss, Laboratory Manager
Dr Stacey Keenan, Postdoctoral Fellow
GRADUATE RESEARCHERS
Olivia Lee - PhD Candidate
Natasha Suriani - PhD Candidate
Cooper Bowring - PhD Candidate
Molla Abebe - PhD Candidate
(Luna) Yue Wang - PhD Student
(Yolanda) Yingnan Peng - Masters of Biomedical Sciences
Amelia Sim - MPhil Student
Research Projects
Faculty Research Themes
School Research Themes
Cancer in Biomedicine, Molecular Mechanisms of Disease, Cell Signalling, Systems Biology, Therapeutics & Translation
Key Contact
For further information about this research, please contact Head of Laboratory Professor Matthew Watt
Department / Centre
Unit / Centre
Watt laboratory: Metabolism and Diabetes
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