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news.Pfizer has entered into a collaboration agreement with four major research universities, University of California, Santa Barbara; Caltech; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and University of Massachusetts, and Entelos, a physiological modeling company, to re-examine the regulatory mechanisms of human energy metabolism.
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Pfizer is funding the three-year and $14 million Insulin Resistance Pathway (IRP) Project to look at insulin signaling in adipose (fat) cells to increase understanding of diabetes and obesity, inextricably linked conditions.
The first stage of the project will include an examination of insulin signaling in adipose, or fat, cells. Researchers at Pfizer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Massachusetts will perform data collection and analyses, which will then be fed to the computational groups at MIT, Caltech and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The conditions of the collaboration allow the academic partners to publish or patent any discoveries made in the areas of basic biology. If the first phase of the project proves successful, a second, two-year phase will extend these studies to other insulin-sensitive tissues, liver, muscle and possibly hypothalamic or beta cells.