Dr. Amira Klip is a Senior Scientist in the Cell Biology Program at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute, and a Professor of Paediatrics, Biochemistry, and Physiology at the University of Toronto. Her research on insulin resistance expanded our understanding of type 2 diabetes, especially how it affects muscle cells to prevent blood glucose control in individuals living with the condition.

When you eat, your blood glucose levels increase, prompting your pancreas to release insulin into your blood to lower glucose levels to a healthy range. Insulin does this by sending a message to your muscles and fat, instructing them to take up and store that glucose. In type 2 diabetes, a phenomenon called insulin resistance occurs. Muscles and fat do not respond correctly to these signals and as a result they do not effectively absorb the glucose from your blood. This leads to high blood glucose levels, a hallmark of type 2 diabetes.

How and why insulin resistance develops in muscles was not fully understood. Dr. Klip’s research examined how glucose gets transported into muscle by insulin. She was first to reveal the complex process behind how the glucose transporter, GLUT4, moves to the muscle surface to pick up glucose from our bloodstream for storage in our muscles. From there, using rodent muscle cells, she discovered which parts stop working in insulin resistance and what happens as a result. She saw that a handful of the proteins that are supposed to receive signals from insulin and transmit them to GLUT4 were no longer functioning optimally. This limited the ability of GLUT4 to travel to the cell surface and pick up glucose from our blood, leading to high blood glucose levels. It was a crucial finding, suggesting it may be possible to create specific interventional therapies in the future to rectify these signalling problems.

Dr. Klip’s discovery led to a cascade of new research and her lab is currently investigating what exactly causes insulin resistance to develop in these muscles. They have found that saturated fatty acids from our diet can activate our immune response and increase inflammation, which has been shown to interfere with insulin signalling in the muscles. Their next goal is to uncover whether insulin delivery to muscles in type 2 diabetes is inhibited in any way by our vessels.

Dr. Klip shares her groundbreaking discoveries through international talks, and hundreds of published papers, while mentoring a large cohort of young scientists in her research labs.

— Written by Ayaat Hassan