Dr. André Carpentier receives the Young Scientist Award
by Polly VandenBerg, Manager, Research Knowledge Translation
The National Research Council of the Canadian Diabetes Association is pleased to announce that Dr. André Carpentier is the 2012 recipient of the Canadian Diabetes Association–Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes Young Scientist Award. The Canadian Diabetes Association established the Young Scientist Award in 1987 to encourage outstanding research conducted in Canada by young scientists (not past their 45th birthday) in the field of diabetes. This is the first year that the Association is partnering with the CIHR Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes for this award.
Dr. Carpentier is a well-known doctor and researcher whose research focuses on how type 2 diabetes changes the way fats are metabolised in the body after a meal, links between heart failure and fat metabolism, and how bariatric (weight loss) surgery helps improve type 2 diabetes and fat metabolism. He is an innovator who has developed some cutting-edge technologies to help him further his research.
Dr. Carpentier is a professor and clinician-scientist in the departments of Medicine and Physiology, Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke and the Centre de recherche clinique Étienne-Le Bel. He is the director of the Université de Sherbrooke’s Diabetes, Obesity and Cardiovascular Complications Research Centre and the director of the new Cardiometabolic Health, Diabetes, and Obesity Research Network of the Fonds de la recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS).
In order to do his research, Dr. Carpentier has received funding from the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Fonds de la recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS). There are two types of fat: white fat and brown fat. White fat is used to store energy, and brown fat makes body heat in mammals that do not shiver and in newborn humans. When a person gets cold, glucose is moved out of the blood and into brown fat where it is used up as energy, and makes heat; brown fat, however, doesn’t do this as well in people who are obese or who have diabetes. During his current Canadian Diabetes Association research grant (funded 2010-2013), Dr. Carpentier is looking into how brown fat uses up blood glucose and fat. Dr. Carpentier and his colleagues are examining how cold causes brown fat to work better, and if therapies could be made that would tell brown fat to use glucose as excess energy in people with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Carpentier has developed a new technology that can show how much energy brown fat uses up in the cold. This study will let Dr. Carpentier know if there is a way to activate brown fat as a way to prevent and treat obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Dr. Carpentier has been a member of many review committees for agencies that fund research, including the Canadian Diabetes Association, CIHR, FRQS, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. Dr. Carpentier has published more than 200 abstracts and communications and 80 publications that went through a peer-review evaluation. Not only is Dr. Carpentier a highly productive and respected researcher, but he has also received many awards, including the 2004 Jonathan-Ballon Award of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Quebec, the 2009 André-Dupont Young Scientist Award of the Club de Recherches Cliniques du Québec, and the 2011 Young Diabetes Investigator Award from the Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Also in 2011, Dr. Carpentier was the inaugural recipient of the five-year CIHR-GlaxoSmithKline Research Chair in Diabetes.
The Canadian Diabetes Association–Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes Young Scientist Award is the latest of Dr. Carpentier’s awards. The award was presented to Dr. Carpentier at the Canadian Diabetes Association/Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism Professional Conference and Annual Meetings on October 12, 2012, in Vancouver, B.C. The significance of the award and the distinguished recipient was recognized by a special lecture. Dr. Carpentier’s award lecture was called “Adipose tissue dysfunctions and mechanisms of ectopic fat deposition in type 2 diabetes: to boldly go where no one has gone before….” Dr. Carpentier’s objectives for this lecture were to have his audience understand the roles of white and brown fat in how fat is stored and used in the body; appreciate how complicated after-meal fat storage and use is in humans; receive an overview of the new technologies used to study fat storage and use; and (Dr. Carpentier’s tongue-in-cheek bonus) understand how his talk was connected to Star Trek, proving that not all scientists live up to the stereotype of the humourless academic (hint: the connection to Star Trek has to do with new technologies and anti-matter).
During his lecture, Dr. Carpentier explained that when fat is stored in places where it shouldn’t be, such as the muscles, liver, and heart, this improper storage is closely linked to developing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. White fat regulates how much fat is circulating in the blood stream. People with pre-diabetes or diabetes do not properly store white fat, which causes too many fats in the blood stream. Brown fat is also less active in people with type 2 diabetes, meaning that blood energy may not be used up fast enough. Both high blood glucose and high blood fats are risk factors for developing diabetes and diabetes-related complications.
Dr. Carpentier and his team have developed a new tool to see how brown and white fats are acting in people with pre-diabetes and diabetes. Their findings shed new light on the sophisticated ways that fat is stored and used, and how this process changes during the development of type 2 diabetes. New links between changes to how fats are stored and used and early heart damage are now being uncovered. Dr. Carpentier hopes that this information could be used to find ways to predict and avoid the complications of diabetes.
The Canadian Diabetes Association applauds Dr. Carpentier for receiving the Canadian Diabetes Association–Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes Young Scientist Award, recognizing his accomplishments in the field of diabetes research. We look forward to many more years of progress from Dr. Carpentier.