Turning cold adaptation into metabolic medicines: Q&A with Shingo Kajimura

A mechanism Shingo Kajimura discovered in 2017, with no connection to drug development at the time, turns out to underlie one of today’s most commercially important obesity drug classes.

A 2024 Cell Metabolism paper found that GIP — the second hormone in dual- and triple-agonist drugs such as tirzepatide — drives weight loss in mice partly by activating “futile calcium cycling” in fat tissue. The machinery the paper implicated, SERCA2b and RyR2, is the same UCP1-independent mechanism that Kajimura’s lab first identified as a route by which beige fat generates heat. ...