Does the satiety hormone GLP-1 in the olfactory bulb regulate blood glucose and appetite?

Obesity and diabetes are two of the major health challenges particularly in the urban, developed world with its sedentary lifestyles and easy access to high-calorie food. Some of the most promising drugs for both diseases are analogues of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1).

Our body produces GLP-1 in both the gut and in the brain, acting in the pancreas to improve insulin secretion and in the brain predominantly to elicit satiation. Our laboratory is at the forefront of research analysing the actions of brain-produced GLP-1, and we recently reported the existence of both GLP-1-producing and GLP-1-receptor-expressing neurons within the mammalian olfactory system. Professor Magnan's group has recently discovered that exogenous GLP-1 acts within the olfactory bulb to improve glucose handling, suggesting GLP-1 signalling in this brain region may be relevant in diabetes. These findings prompted our recent encounter at the Incretin Study Group meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Bochum, Germany, resulting in our decision to try and combine our fields of expertise and complementary research tools (including transgenic mouse models, viral gene delivery for chemogenetics, and odor detection and discrimination tasks) to investigate the importance of GLP-1 within the olfactory system for glucose control and appetite regulation.

The Cities' Partnerships Programme enables us to send researchers from each lab on intensive exchange visits (1 week at a time) to a) acquire new skills to be subsequently established in their home laboratories, and b) to bring new expertise to the laboratory visited. This will be done both at senior and early-career levels. Additionally, we aim to hold a one-day discussion meeting in London, and another in Paris bringing together all key researchers involved in this project. At those times the visiting senior researchers will also give departmental seminars at UCL and the Sorbonne, respectively, that will be open to everyone at the respective institutions.

Area

Neurscience, Metabolic Disease

UCL leads

• Professor Stefan Trapp, Division of Biosciences