2025 PRESENTER PROFILES
What Is the Real Molecular Target(s) of Metformin?
Friday, June 20, at 2:00 p.m. CT
Room W183 A • McCormick Place Convention Center
The Intersection of Metformin and Inflammation
Barbara Nikolajczyk, PhD
Professor,
University of Kentucky
What is your presentation about?
Inflammation fuels insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and many of the cancers that are co-morbidities of obesity. Metformin has anti-inflammatory properties, but the mechanisms of action underlying these properties remain unclear. We demonstrate that metformin intervention through a clinical trial improves autophagy and inflammatory profiles in CD4 T-cells from subjects with obesity who are also insulin resistant, but has no impact on CD4 T-cells from subjects who are metabolically healthy.
How do you hope your presentation will impact diabetes research or care?
Defining molecular pathways that drive inflammation in human obesity-associated type 2 diabetes will identify new targets for alleviating this key regulator of numerous co-morbidities. Our work interprets the outcomes of metformin intervention as both an information-generating tool and a possible intervention for insulin resistance, a metabolic state that is not considered clinically actionable at present.
How did you become involved with this area of diabetes research or care?
My father died from obesity-associated type 2 diabetes. As I watched his disease develop and progress, my immunology training inspired me to ask whether inflammation, which is dominantly generated by immune cells, might play a role in type 2 diabetes. This was back in the early 2000s, before the field appreciated the critical role systemic inflammation plays in obesity sequelae. Our 2011 demonstration that the Th17 T-cell subset dominates type 2 diabetes inflammation in people set the stage for leveraging this finding into new treatments for type 2 diabetes pathogenesis through work that continues in my lab today.
