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IS-DAAD-Forskerutveksl. Norge-Tyskland

Exercise and Metabolism in Diabetes

Awarded: NOK 56,757

The main goal of this German-Norwegian interaction on "Exercise and Metabolism in Diabetes" is to establish a long term collaboration related to the role of skeletal muscle in onset and progression of T2D. This research will increase knowledge and understanding of the disease, improve training and exchange of students/postdocs and ultimately yield new concepts for combating the disease. The exchange will establish a new collaboration between School of Pharmacy at University of Oslo and The German Diabetes Center at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf. Our research interests are highly complementary and extend each other in terms of a translational research aspect. The Norwegian research group has an extensive expertise in studying metabolic events in vitro while the German group has expertise in molecular studies of skeletal muscle metabolism, and access to clinical studies including muscle biopsies from patients/intervention studies. By combining our knowledge and methods we will be able to study the molecular mechanisms responsible for the development of insulin resistance andT2D in vivo and in vitro. We will perform molecular studies on impact of contraction/exercise on disease development in vitro in human skeletal muscle cells, derived from metabolically deeply phenotyped individuals with T2D from the German Diabetes Study Cohort. We hypothesize that metabolic adaptation of skeletal muscle cells to contraction and the subsequent alterations in the myokine-profile determine metabolic response of an individual to exercise, and accounts at least in part for the diabetes-protective effect of physical exercise. Thus, consequential scientific aims of the project are to investigate: i) metabolic adaptation of skeletal muscle cells to contraction and subsequent myokine release in muscle cells from healthy individuals and T2D ii) molecular pathways that lead to enhanced insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle cells after exercise/contraction

Funding scheme:

IS-DAAD-Forskerutveksl. Norge-Tyskland