Over £1 million of European Union money has been awarded to a leading Dundee University professor to coordinate a research project across five European countries. Professor Grahame Hardie is to lead the new research investigating the links between diet, exercise and Type 2 diabetes.
It is estimated that 15 million people throughout Europe suffer from this form of diabetes and that the increasingly high prevalence of this type of diabetes is partly due to the “couch potato” lifestyle all too often adopted in today’s society.
The main focus of the three-year project is a system known as the AMP-activated protein kinase. This system monitors the energy level of every living cell in the human body and is activated by exercise in muscle.
Once activated, it is responsible for increased use of carbohydrates and fats to provide energy for muscle action, decreased conversion of carbohydrates to fats, and decreased storage of fats in fat tissue.
The grant to Professor Hardie is just one of several such awards made throughout the EU to conduct research in this area. However, as Professor Hardie comments, none of this would have been possible without a discovery made almost fifteen years ago in Dundee.
“It is very pleasing that a discovery we made here at the University of Dundee almost 15 years ago, when we first defined the protein kinase, is now the focus of such intensive Europe-wide research,” Hardie said.
Hardie is Professor of Cellular Signalling and Deputy Head of the Division of Molecular Physiology at the University of Dundee.
[Contact: Professor Grahame Hardie, David Cunningham]
18-Sep-2001
