How cool would it be to be able to warm up on a freezing winter day just by taking a pill? For now it seems like science fiction, but it could soon become reality thanks to the project of the bioengineer of Rice University (USA) Jerzy Szablowski, which has won a grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a US government agency that develops new technologies for military use. Szablowski’s idea is to develop a non-genetic drug that temporarily improves our body’s resistance to extreme temperatures. Let’s see how that would work.
Thermogenesis in humans. The human body has two ways to react to cold: shivering – shivering, even slowly, raises body temperature – or using BAT (brown adipose tissue, or brown adipose tissue) also called brown fat (so-called “good fat”, as opposed to white fat), to burn the fatty acids present in the body and generate heat. This second type of thermogenesis is faster, but doesn’t generate as much heat as shivering – at least not in humans.
A BAT-drug. Hence Szablowski’s idea of finding a drug capable of enhancing the response of BAT, which could help first aid personnel treat victims of hypothermia, but also, in the scientific field, reduce the costs of Arctic exploration. “If you have a drug that enhances brown fat activity, you don’t have to spend weeks adjusting to the cold, but you can be up and running within hours,” Szablowski explains.
Previous searches. It is not the first time that scholars have dealt with brown fat: in August 2022 the Scripps Research Institute had identified a metabolite, called myristoyl glycine, which induced the creation of brown fat cells in mice without apparently giving side effects; Earlier, in 2020, National Institutes of Health researchers found that mirabegron, a drug used to treat overactive bladder, stimulated brown fat activity in female volunteers who took twice the recommended dose for four weeks. . In this case, however, there were side effects, and the high doses of the drug increased cardiac stress.
Now we just have to wait for the developments of Szablowski’s research, hoping that the bioengineer will soon be able to find a drug capable of warming us up quickly.