BU Researcher Awarded $2.2M NIH Grant

Noyan Gokce, MD, professor of Medicine at BUSM, has received a four-year, $2.2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Gokce, along with his co-principal investigator Vishwajeet Puri, PhD, professor at the Diabetes Institute at Ohio University, will investigate the relationship between obesity-induced changes in fat tissue metabolism in human adipose stores (tissue that stores energy in the form of fat) in relation to vascular and cardiometabolic dysfunction.

The obesity epidemic has developed into a critical health care problem as 69 percent of the U.S. population is currently overweight or obese. This research will seek to characterize the relationship between obesity, adipose tissue dysfunction, insulin resistance, and how these processes cause vascular disease.

“Our study will employ a number of complementary approaches harnessing physiological studies of vasomotor function and angiogenesis in live human vessels, innovative cell-autonomous gain-and-loss of function biological methods and novel animal model constructs to gain novel insight into the role of a newly identified protein FSP27 in the pathogenesis of obesity-related vascular disease,” explained Dr. Gokce.

Dr. Gokce is a cardiologist and the Director of Echocardiography at Boston Medical Center (BMC). He is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases and adult echocardiography. He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC), and American Society of Echocardiography (FASE) and was inducted to the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI). He received the “Excellence in Clinical Teaching” awards in 2006, 2011, and 2017 from the BMC cardiovascular division. He was also awarded the 2012 “Collaborator of the Year” award in Clinical/Translational Sciences as well as First Prize in Clinical Research at the Evans Memorial Department of Medicine 100^th Anniversary Celebration. His laboratory has been NIH funded for 18 consecutive years.