I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
nothing to be honest! We weren’t even looking for a diet drug.
What happened is…..my boss had a look at the pancreas from people with diabetes. She found that one particular protein was very low in diabetes compared to normal healthy control people. One way to increase this protein was to use an iron chelator drug, so we chose deferasirox to increase the protein in mice. In mice, when we give them a diet high in fat, eventually they get diabetes (just like people). So we decided to give these mice the iron chelator drug to increase this protein in their pancreas, and we hoped it would help prevent diabetes! It did!
We then repeated the same study but put the mice on a diet for 6 months to see if the drug could still prevent diabetes after 6 months. That’s when we found purely by accident that these mice were not getting fat on the diet! So that’s how it happened. We didn’t look for it, but now that we have found it, I’m trying to figure out how the drug keeps your body thin on a maccas diet…
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