Professor Jae-beom Kim’s team at Seoul National University has discovered immune cells that eliminate bad fat cells.

[한국강사신문 한상형 기자] Seoul National University (president Yoo Hong-rim) announced that Professor Jae-beom Kim’s team has discovered immune cells that eliminate bad fat cells.

When you are obese, inflammatory reactions occur in the adipose tissue and large, harmful fat cells accumulate. Because bad fat cells cause metabolic diseases, including diabetes and abnormalities of lipid metabolism, it is important to remove them properly to maintain healthy fat cells. A self-protective mechanism has been proposed in which specific immune cells within adipose tissue suppress the accumulation of bad fat cells during obesity, but the specific process for this is not well known. Therefore, identifying specific immune cells capable of self-protection in adipose tissue and understanding their process of action may be key to developing new treatments for metabolic diseases.

This study again proposes the existence of a self-protective mechanism in which adipose tissue-specific immune cells remove bad fat cells and generate new healthy fat cells to keep the adipose tissue healthy. This is expected to become a new goal for defeating obesity and developing treatments for metabolic diseases.

Obesity is a key risk factor that causes several metabolic diseases (diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, etc.) and causes huge socioeconomic losses worldwide (approximately $2 trillion, as of 2020). Obesity causes an inflammatory response in adipose tissue and increases the percentage of large “bad fat cells”. The accumulation of such harmful fat cells causes various metabolic diseases such as diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, the self-protection process of removing bad fat cells and replacing them with new healthy fat cells can help reduce the inflammatory response in adipose tissue and safely store excess fat in obesity. However, nothing is known about how this self-protection process is regulated through “fat cell replacement”.

Recently, the research group of Professor Jae-beom Kim from the Department of Life Sciences, College of Natural Sciences, Seoul National University, and the research group of Professor Jong-kyung Kim from POSTECH demonstrated that “invariant natural killer T cells (iNKT),” a type of immune cell found in adipose tissue, plays a key role in the process of replacing fat cells. I discovered that it can be done.

This study revealed that a specific subpopulation of iNKT cells within adipose tissue is newly generated in obesity and can selectively induce the death of large inflammatory adipocytes through its high apoptotic capacity. On the other hand, other subpopulations of iNKT cells in adipose tissue have been found to be involved in the creation of new adipocytes by promoting the division of adipose tissue stem cells.

This study revealed for the first time that specific immune cells play an important role in maintaining healthy adipose tissue, revealing the mechanism by which specific immune cells regulate the process of removing and replacing bad fat cells within adipose tissue. It can be said that the discovery of this specific function of immune cells has opened a new chapter in overcoming obesity and in the development of treatments for metabolic diseases.

The results of this research were published on December 21, 2023 in the online edition of ‘Nature Communications’, a leading international academic journal in the field of biology. This study was conducted with the support of the Leader Researcher Support project of the Ministry of Science and ICT.

2023-12-31 00:20:53
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