Photo credit: Banting Research Foundation
With one in every four Canadian either overweight or obese, we have to examine beyond simply diet and exercise and recognize the complexity of metabolic and genetic factors that lead to these conditions. Dr. Gareth Lim wants to fight obesity by tackling the fat cells themselves. With his research program in Montréal, Dr. Lim wants to understand how proteins interact with each other and what goes wrong in chronic metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes.
Dr. Lim had always been interested in metabolic disorders, beginning his research career as a PhD candidate in Physiology at the University of Toronto. There, he worked with Dr. Patricia Brubaker to investigate the effects of insulin and insulin resistance on the body’s ability to secrete glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a hormone involved in lowering blood sugar levels. He then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. James Johnson’s group at the University of British Columbia, where his attention pivoted towards molecular scaffold proteins (proteins that stably bring two or more other proteins together) in metabolism. Through this work, he revealed that a certain family of scaffold proteins plays an essential role in a range of metabolic functions like controlling glucose levels, pancreatic β-cell survival, and the formation of fat cells (also known as adipocytes).
This work became the foundations of Dr. Lim’s own research program. In 2016, he was appointed a Principal Scientist at the CHUM Research Centre in Montréal, and currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Université de Montréal.
With his own group, Dr. Lim wants to better understand how scaffold proteins affect the development and function of pancreatic β-cells and fat cells. Current treatments for obesity have not had much success in maintaining weight loss long term. The interplay of many different factors in metabolism and the complexity of these conditions need to be addressed when developing new drugs. Dr. Lim’s team thinks specifically targeting fat cells may be an effective strategy. In fact, during his postdoctoral work, Dr. Lim found that mice lacking a specific member of this family of proteins (14-3-3zeta) in every cell of the body had 50% less fat than mice that had the protein. His team is currently exploring whether reducing activity of these proteins in fat cells can be an effective way of preventing obesity.
In 2017, Dr. Lim received the Banting Research Foundation Discovery Award for this work, which is awarded to outstanding new investigators at universities and research institutes in Canada who are engaging in innovative health and medical research projects. Upon receiving the award, his postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Johnson noted that his former mentee “has already carved out a unique and important research niche early in his career.” He has also been the Canada Research Chair in Adipocyte Development since 2018. Dr. Lim hopes that this work will uncover insights that will lead to better therapies for obesity, and in turn, reduce Type 2 diabetes risk and development.
— Written by Angela Zhou