A small protein may have a big role in helping you make more bone and less fat, says Dr. Xingming Shi, bone biologist at the Medical College of Georgia Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics. "The pathways are parallel, and the idea is if you can somehow disrupt the fat production pathway, you will get more bone"
He's found the short-acting protein GILZ appears to make this desirable shift and wants to better understand how it does it with the long-term goal of targeted therapies for osteoporosis, obesity and maybe more.
Weight gain and bone loss are established side effects of glucocorticoids, whose wide-ranging uses include treatment for arthritis, asthma, infections and organ transplants. Ironically, glucocorticoids also induce a short burst of GILZ. GILZ, in turn, inhibits the transcription factor PPARã2, called the master regulator of adipogenesis, or fat production, as well as CCAAT/enhancer-binding proteins that turn on this fat-producing gene. One way GILZ does this is by binding to the regulatory region of PPARã2, Dr. Shi has shown.