The numbers of people with diabetes and prediabetes are increasing rapidly within the United States and throughout the world. People with diabetes possess significant risks of developing severe health complications, which create enormous social, economic, and psychological burdens to society. Joslin Diabetes Center is the world leader in managing and treating this devastating disease and is committed to advance research in discovering and developing preventative treatments, new therapies, and ultimately cure diabetes. One of the essential and powerful techniques required for the diverse diabetes research is metabolic phenotyping. In this application, we request funds to support the purchase of the Promethion Core High Definition Metabolic Phenotyping System for metabolic studies in mice from Sable Systems International. The Sable Promethion system is a non-invasive, high resolution comprehensive real-time lab animal monitoring system with environmental chamber, exercise wheel, stable isotope analyzer, and germ-free caging that enable advanced metabolic and behavioral characterization of mouse physiology. The Promethion instrument is being requested through this application in order to replace the current older Comprehensive Lab Animal Monitoring System that has been used to its maximum capacity continuously for the past 13 years and to add new features to advance research projects that utilize this instrumentation. The proposed instrument will be used by at least 19 major and minor labs at Joslin and institutions in the surrounding research community. More than 95% of the committed users are currently funded by Federal grants. The instrument will support research projects focused on insulin actions, insulin resistance, growth factor signaling, adipocyte biology, nutrient utilization, molecular mechanisms of exercise, epigenetics, islet biology, vascular function, microbiomes, cancer, aging, and others. This instrument will be housed in the Animal Physiology Core facility of Joslin?s NIH-funded Diabetes Research Center and will be maintained by one full-time technician and the Core manager. The addition of the Sable Promethion System to Joslin?s Animal Physiology Core will not only fulfill the critical need for technologically advanced instrumentation of metabolic phenotyping but also significantly increase the quantity of high quality of metabolic studies performed by users of the Joslin Animal Physiology Core. It will ultimately lead to discoveries that pave the ways to develop new approaches for the prevention and treatment of diabetes and its complications.
Diabetes and its complications are prominent health burdens in the United States. This proposal requests to obtain a state-of-the-art metabolic phenotyping instrument for advancing metabolic studies. The proposed instruments will benefit many NIH-funded research projects and will have a significant impact on the progress of diabetes research.
