Regulation of Energy and Glucose Metabolism: Timo Müller Honored with Minkowski Prize Awarded by the EASD

Dr. Timo Müller is Acting Director and Head of the Division of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity at Helmholtz Munich. The scientist's research is focused on the development of novel pharmacotherapies to treat obesity and diabetes, as well as to decipher their complex signal mechanisms in the brain and the periphery.

Throughout his career, Timo Müller has been at the forefront of diabetes research, and his contributions have significantly advanced the understanding of how biochemically engineered gut hormone therapeutics can be used to treat obesity, diabetes, and their co-morbidities. Among Timo Müller’s groundbreaking contributions is the demonstration that glucagon-mediated delivery of T3 enhances cholesterol and lipid metabolism via synergistic glucagon and T3 action in the liver, with only limited off-target T3 effects in tissues devoid of the glucagon receptor. He further demonstrated that GLP-1-mediated delivery of estrogen synergizes with GLP-1 to improve pancreatic islet function in type 1 diabetic mice and that GLP-1-mediated delivery of Tesaglitazar improves insulin sensitivity in obese mice via synergistic and GLP-1R-selective action in the brain and the periphery. Timo Müller further showed in mice that long-acting GIPR agonists decrease body weight and food intake via the brain GIP receptor, and that central GIPR signaling is a vital constituent for the body weight-reducing effect of GIPR:GLP-1R co-agonists.

Timo Müller's research has significantly contributed to our understanding of energy metabolism, obesity, and diabetes. His work has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine and Nature Metabolism, and has been rewarded with several awards, including the Galenus-von Pergamon Prize of Springer Medicine and the Werner-Creutzfeldt Award of the German Diabetes Association. As an ERC Consolidator Grant awardee, Timo Müller continues to strive towards personalized preventive and therapeutic strategies for the treatment of obesity and diabetes, with a focus on not only the development of novel pharmacotherapies, but also on the delineation of how GIP and GIPR:GLP-1R co-agonists act in the brain and the periphery to control energy and glucose metabolism.