Researchers from the Human Protein Atlas are planning a clinical trial of a new treatment for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes which harnesses liver cells own ability to burn accumulated fats.

In a study involving 86 patients with varying degrees of fatty liver disease, researchers found that the liver has the ability to burn up accumulated fats. The researchers propose a mixture of substances that will set this process in motion.

Assistant Professor Adil Mardinoglu says the team´s metabolic modeling approach, which relied on data from the Human Protein Atlas project, can be used for a number of chronic liver diseases...Read more

Adil Mardinoglu is a SciLifeLab fellow and the newest addition to the Protein Atlas team of principal investigators. He is the leader of the systems biology group, a group that create biological networks to identify drug targets and discover biomarkers for the development of efficient treatment strategies.

But Adil´s background is not in medicine, he is an electronic engineer with a PhD in computational biology.

– I did my PhD in Ireland where I worked with magnetic drug targeting, he says.

After a one year post doc doing research on neuronal networks, Adil Mardinoglu moved to Chalmers in Gothenburg to join Jens Nielsens group in systems biology...Read more

In a paper in a recent issue of Cell Metabolism, Human Protein Atlas-researchers investigate the biological processes that are altered in obese subjects.

Obesity is associated with an increased risk for a wide range of morbidities, including insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and cardiovascular disease. Although the prevalence of obesity continues to dramatically increase worldwide, a clear understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in the progression of associated disorders is still lacking...Read more

In a recent number of Nature Reviews, Human Protein Atlas researchers Mathias Uhlén and Adil Mardinoglu discuss a study by E.G. Williams and co workers in Science where five complementary -omics datasets across various environmental states (including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics) using the liver as a platform for multiomics analysis are integrated...Read more

Last week, researchers from the Human Protein Atlas, together with others, published a study on drug-induced liver injury in the journal Liver International.

Drug-induced liver injury is the single leading cause for termination of drug development and safety-related withdrawal of approved drugs from the market. In clinical practice, it accounts for more than 50% of liver failure cases and represents a major safety issue for patients. In some patients, drug-induced liver injury can cause severe injury leading to acute liver failure that can be life threatening and require liver transplantation...Read more

In a very recent paper in Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry , with researchers from the Human Protein Atlas, it is shown that the expression of aquaporin 9 is limited in normal tissues, and high membranous expression is observed only in hepatocytes.

Aquaporin 9 is known to facilitate hepatocyte glycerol uptake. Murine aquaporin 9 protein expression has been verified in liver, skin, epididymis, epidermis and neuronal cells using knockout mice.

One goal of the current study was to systematically explore the distribution of aquaporin 9 expression in humans...Read more