Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) — Harvard University researchers say they're one step closer to creating a pill that may someday replace the treadmill, thanks to a breakthrough that can change the way energy-storing white fat cells behave.

The laboratory work enables scientists to more easily manipulate white fat cells, the bad kind that stores energy for later use and contributes to obesity and diabetes, according to the report in Nature Cell Biology. The scientists screened about 1,000 compounds and found two that make the white fat cells act more like their brown cousins, which burn excess energy rather than store it.

"What we wanted to do is take the white fat no one wants, especially post-holidays, and turn it into the fat everyone wants, the brown fat," said senior author Chad Cowan, a faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. The results suggest "you could someday come up with a small molecule that might be a pill that would replace a treadmill in terms of its ability to burn fat or burn calories," he said in a telephone interview.

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.