Journal of Obesity & Weight Loss Therapy
Open Access

Abstract

Obesity epidemic is a growing global health threat. So far there is no safe and effective way to prevent obesity, as weight loss does not simply depend on diet or physical exercises. Obesity is characterized by an excessive accumulation of adipose tissue; therefore understanding the biological features of adipocytes is one of the keys to find the cure for obesity. Several in vitro models, such as 3T3-L1, primary pre-adipocytes or some adult multi-potent stem cells, contribute to our understanding of adipogenesis and the mechanisms of obesity. However, they are either murine origin cell lines or primary cells with limited expansion, which caused many contradictory results. In present study, we developed an improved method to get human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) with high capacity of adipocyte differentiation (80-95% efficiency) after one day adipocyte differentiation treatments. The gene expression signatures of the adipocytes differentiated from the hiPSCs-MSCs is highly similar to primary mature adipocytes with sensitive insulin response and function of adipokines secretion. Our previous study demonstrated that C10orf116 and miR-148a facilitated adipogenesis in primary pre-adipocyte or MSCs. We use these two factors to test the application of our newly developed hiPSCs-MSCs-adipocyte model in adipogenesis research. In addition, by comparing iPSCs lines from donors with different body mass index (BMI), we found the efficiency of adipogenic differentiation was highly related to BMI of the donors. In conclusion, this hiPSCs-MSCs-adipocyte model we developed is fast, highly efficient and with patient specific genetic background and can be a great tool for adipogenesis research and other obesity mechanism or clinical research.

Biography

Email: chenboji@njmu.edu.cn