Professor Antonio Vidal-Puig

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Email: ajv22@medschl.cam.ac.uk

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Website:www.mrl.ims.cam.ac.uk/research/principal-investigators/antonio-vidal-puig/

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About me

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Prof Vidal-Puig obtained his medical degree from Valencia Medical School before training in clinical endocrinology at Granada Medical School, where he obtained his PhD based on clinical and physiological studies of the relationship between insulin resistance and hyperandrogenism. The award of the Paul Dudley White Fellowship from the American Heart Association funded postdoctoral training at Harvard University. In 2000 he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he developed the obesity, diabetes and cardiometabolic complications programme.

 

Prof Vidal-Puig is currently the Professor of Molecular Nutrition and Metabolism at Cambridge University and Honorary Consultant in Metabolic Medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science Director of the Cambridge Phenomics Centre, and Scientific Director of cardiometabolic medicine at Cambridge Heart and Lung Research Institute.

 

Vidal-Puig maintains a close relationship with Spain, as a researcher at the Príncipe Felipe Research Center in Valencia (Spain) and Rey Juan Carlos University collaborator. He is a member of the SABs of CIBERob, CIBERDem, and Health Research Institutes in Spain. He serves as Chair of the ERC Medicine LS4 panel and participated in evaluation committees of Severo Ochoa, and Jaime I awards.

 

Vidal-Puig directs the biomedicine program at the Center for Technology and Innovation at the University of Cambridge in Nanjing. Vidal-Puig is a concurrent professor at Nanjing University (China), Soochow University (China), and Chiba University (Japan). Vidal-Puig is a member of the Center for AI Technology of Humankind at the National University of Singapore Business School.

 

His research program focuses on the molecular mechanisms of lipid-induced insulin resistance and lipotoxicity modulating fatty acid oxidation and thermogenic mechanisms. Prof. Vidal-Puig is the author of 260 scientific articles and has trained many PhDs, and postdoctoral, many of them established in Spain

 

Vidal-Puig has received important awards such as the International Hippocrates Award for Research in Nutrition (RAM Principality Asturias), FEBS National Lecturer, Medal of the British Endocrinology Society and the Lilly Foundation Distinguished Career Award. Sir Philip Randle Lecture Award from the British Biochemical Society, among others. 

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In his current role as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Argonaute RNA, Prof. Vidal-Puig continues to advance the translation of molecular discoveries into novel therapeutic approaches for cardiometabolic disorders.

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Research Interests

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The research of my laboratory, the TVPLab (TVPLab, http://tvp.mrl.ims.cam.ac.uk/) focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms linking obesity with insulin resistance, diabetes and cardiometabolic complications and on the development of related therapeutic strategies.

The Vision of the group is to lead the discovery of “the new biological concepts/molecular mechanism s that are going to transform the treatment of obesity and diabetes”.

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Our Mission is to unravel the mechanisms controlling energy homeostasis and understand how they fail and cause obesity and diabetes. Our mission is not to find specific drugs. The reason for our existence is to identify the biochemical paths that these drugs should target.

The group is well known by its creativity reflected in the “adipose tissue expandability hypothesis” and the concept of “lipotoxicity” to explain the association between obesity and insulin resistance. We are also leaders in the field of thermogenesis and brown adipose tissue. Here at the Sanger Institute we will be working on a project related to Brown adipose tissue and human iPs cells, funded by an ERC advanced award and will also contribute to the characterization of animal models related to obesity and diabetes modelling human and systems biology derived data.

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Our research strategies include a combination of hypothesis driven and non-biased systems approaches that make use of purposely genetically modified animal models, stem cell biology, human biological samples (including induced pluripotent stem cells), and sophisticated omics technologies and bioinformatics integration of large datasets.

 

Besides doing research I am also interested in management of talent in research intensive institutions. Over the years I have become fascinated by the highly talented PhD students and post docs I came across and on many occasions how their talent was wasted. So I believe a major problem in academic science is the poor management of this great talent to realise its value. Thus I am interested in better understanding and developing innovative approaches to talent management in academic research-intensive institutions. How it is best to manage the talent of academic scientists is an area under researched. However I am confident that some of the insights I have gained from current business management practices may be transferable and contribute to obtain the full value of science.

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