Ana Filipa Raimundo, PhD Student at the Molecular Nutrition and Health Laboratory, under the supervision of Regina Menezes and Cláudia Santos, was awarded with a Fulbright Research Fellowship in order to sponsor an internship at the University of Kentucky, USA.
This grant will allow the development of the research project “Amylin oligomers: a link between Type 2-Diabetes and brain pathology” at the Florin Despa Laboratory.
Diabetes affects hundreds of million people worldwide. Regardless of the advances in the disease’s pathophysiology and therapeutics, it still remains one of the world’s leading death causes and of co-morbidities.
The first point of this project is to explore how metabolic stress affects β-cell processing machinery and the consequences on amylin processing and oligomer/amyloid formation. This will shed light on the mechanisms by which unprocessed amylin forms contributes to diabetes onset and progression. the second aim to the project is to scrutinize the pathological role of circulating amylin oligomers towards the different cellular players of the barrier. The transgenic HIP rat model expressing human amylin in the pancreas, developed by Despa’s team, represents a unique tool to address these issues.
This fellowship has the support of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT).