DDI announces the establishment of a new research department: Bioenergetics
Published on 01/07/2022
This new department is led by Dr. Fawaz Alzaid. In this segment, we highlight the future plan for the Bioenergetics Department at DDI.
Energy imbalance affects the body’s metabolism in various ways, from causing weight gain to altering cellular and tissue functions. Obesity is an unavoidable result of long-term energy imbalance, and is highly prevalent in the Kuwaiti population, putting patients at risk of type-2 diabetes (T2D) and other diseases. The main question pertaining to this new department is: How does energy metabolism affect human health?
The Bioenergetics Department at DDI will study the ways in which energy imbalance and changes in metabolism can affect human health. Their main focus will be how the immune system reacts to these changes and how this affects different tissues in the body.
The goal is to improve the expenditure of excess energy and prevent undesirable outcomes, from weight gain to effects on the liver and the immune system. The applications of such work will lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies and will enable us to test new targets to improve the use of excess energy in patients with obesity and T2D. These therapeutic strategies and targets will be potential candidates for manufacturing new classes of metabolically active drugs with industrial partners, working towards clinical research in the future.
Dr. Alzaid’s lab has developed a set of specialized tools to investigate energy balance and metabolism at multiple scales -from cellular to organismic level- and these tools will be brought for application to DDI.
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