Affiliation: Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Prasanna Allu is a post-doctoral fellow in the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He had research experience at UCSF before joining Harvard. Prasanna’s research interests lie in understanding the brown fat metabolism, crucial for the development of treatments and preventive measures for metabolic diseases. Particularly, he studied for the first time a rescue pathway, which signals through cell-autonomous regulation of the mTORC2-Akt kinase cascade to both override adrenergic stimulation of lipogenesis, and synergistically stimulate uncoupling protein-1 which is crucial for the development of treatments for obesity and diabetes-related diseases. In another study, he identified Glycine 297Serine variant of Pancreastatin peptide and discovered it is more potent than its wild-type. This provided a molecular basis for increased potencies/efficacies of human variants and important new insights into the human metabolic disease mechanisms.