Wearable Monitor for Recording the Activity of Brown Adipose Tissue

描述（由申请方提供）：棕色脂肪组织（BAT）是一种在激活时具有代谢活性并从正常白色脂肪中摄取卡路里并燃烧的组织。因此，用于产生和激活的安全方法（BAT）将在对抗肥胖症方面具有巨大价值，肥胖症是一种主要的可预防的死亡原因，在成人和儿童中日益流行，并且是21世纪世纪最严重的公共卫生问题之一。目前开发BAT刺激范例的努力受到无法利用可用医学扫描连续监测BAT活动的阻碍。正电子发射断层扫描（PET）扫描和其他类似类型的扫描仪，可以检测激活的BAT使用大型，昂贵的设备，并只用于提供单一的快照在激活的BAT存在的时间。拟议的第一阶段SBIR计划是为了开发监测器，该监测器可以安全，无创，连续记录至少24小时内个体的BAT活动，并且可以由个体在进行正常活动时佩戴。可穿戴BAT监测器将是小型化的，是成功使用的大型仪器的改进版本（P<0.01），以通过测量由激活的BAT发出的微波热噪声来检测激活的BAT，这是最近完成的由国家糖尿病、消化和肾脏疾病研究所（NIDDK）资助的约翰霍普金斯大学/MMTC R21联合项目，题为“棕色脂肪组织的非侵入性测量”，并将包括微型化装置，用于将测得的最佳可得技术活动储存至少24小时。可穿戴连续BAT激活监测器的可用性不仅在开发可以激活BAT而不会引起不可接受的副作用的药物方面具有重要价值，这是第一种影响能量消耗而不是食欲的肥胖药物，而且在回答以下类型的重要问题方面也具有重要价值：由于暴露于寒冷，BAT的激活和激活程度持续多长时间，这是暴露时间和温度的函数？肾上腺素能β受体阻滞剂导致BAT失活的持续时间和深度与剂量有关，是否有其他广泛使用的药物使BAT失活？在什么程度上做运动，饮食，吸烟，饮酒，咖啡因，在寒冷的天气里穿什么衣服，等等，影响BAT的活动？对于任何可以增强BAT代谢活性的安全药物，这种激活持续多长时间，特定个体必须服用多少此类药物才能显著增加BAT的代谢活性？

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Brown Adipose Tissues (BAT) are tissues that when activated become metabolically active and take calories from normal white fat and burn them. Safe methods for creating and activating (BAT) would therefore be of great value in fighting obesity, a leading preventable cause of death with increasing prevalence in adults and children and one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century. Current efforts to develop BAT stimulation paradigms are hindered by the inability to continuously monitor the activity of BAT with available medical scans. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans and other similar types of scanners that can detect activated BAT use large, expensive equipment and are only useful for providing single snapshots in time of the existence of activated BAT. The proposed Phase I SBIR program is for the development of monitors that can safely, noninvasively, and continuously record the activity of BAT of an individual over a period of at least 24 hours and that can be worn by the individuals while carrying out their normal activities. The wearable BAT monitors will be miniaturized and improved versions of the large instruments that were successfully used (P<0.01) to detect activated BAT by measuring the microwave thermal noise emitted by activated BAT in a recently completed joint Johns Hopkins University/MMTC R21 program funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) entitled "Non-Invasive Measurements of Brown Adipose Tissues", and will include miniaturized devices for storing the measured activity of BAT for periods of at least 24 hours. The availability of wearable continuous BAT activation monitors would be of great value not only in the development of drugs that can activate BAT without causing unacceptable side effects, the first obesity drugs that would affect energy expenditure rather than appetite, but also in answering the following types of important questions: How long do activations and degree of activations of BAT due to exposure to cold last as functions of durations of exposures and temperatures? How long and how deep do deactivations of BAT due to adrenergic beta-blockers last as functions of dosages and are there other widely used drugs that deactivate BAT? To what extend do exercise, diet, smoking, consumption of alcohol, caffeine, type of clothing in cold weather, etc., affect the activity of BAT? For any safe drugs tht can enhance the metabolic activity of BAT, how long does this activation last, how much of such drugs does a particular individual have to take to get a significant increase in the metabolic activity of BAT?