Recently, Jing Hughes, MD, PhD and her collaborator Matthew Merrins, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were awarded nearly four million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support their joint research project titled “Metabolic signaling of the beta cell primary cilium.”
The funding will stretch from July of 2024 to June of 2029 and significantly aid Dr. Hughes and Hughes’ lab in further understanding how cilia actions in the pancreatic islet contribute to glucose and metabolic homeostasis.
Primary cilia are key mediators of β-cell function, which impacts glucose-dependent insulin secretion and is pertinent to diabetes. Existing understandings of primary cilia-mediated insulin β-cell secretory mechanisms are inadequate. This application has the potential to discover new cilia-based therapeutic approaches that could lower the implications of diabetes across the United States.
This collaborative project will identify mechanisms of metabolic signaling through beta cell primary cilia, which drive insulin secretion. The idea that primary cilia can serve as nutrient sensors and communicate with other organelles such as mitochondria has not been tested in islet beta cells. Answering these questions will help us understand how beta cells function.
Jing Hughes, MD, PhD
