CFH Fellowship: Decoding insulin action: dissection of crosstalk between insulin-signalling and GLUT4-traffic

Battling Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) represents one of the most major Global Health Care Challenges of the 21st century. In this debilitating disease tissues (mainly fat and muscle) that normally respond to insulin stop responding with the result that the cascade of cellular processes which clear excessive glucose from the bloodstream fail to initiate.

Many labs study the insulin-signalling pathways that occur at the start of this cascade, and many study the trafficking of a glucose transformer protein known as GLUT4 from internal stores in the cell to the cell surface (from where it enters the body’s circulation and goes on to facilitate the transport of excessive glucose into fat and muscle cells for storage) but little is known about the interface between these two processes and this is a major knowledge gap. Dimitrios will work with two internationally-recognised diabetes labs at the University of York (one in Biology, the other in Chemistry) that work respectively on insulin-signalling and GLUT4-trafficking and try to fill this knowledge gap by dissecting the signals in order to better understand how they mobilise GLUT4.