The rate of obesity in the United States continues to rise, with more than 100 million adults having obesity — a prevalence of 41.9% — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although researchers know that obesity heightens the risk of many health issues, there are still mysteries of how this chronic disease interacts with other health conditions and influences people’s health.
The Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center (NORC), led by Paul MacLean, PhD, and built on a strong partnership between the University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Department of Pediatrics, aims to find answers through collaborative team science in hopes of discovering ways to improve patients’ health.
“Obesity affects just about every tissue of the body in a pathological way, and it affects so many other diseases — cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, kidney diseases, mental health, and so on,” says MacLean, the center’s director and a professor in the CU Department of Medicine’s Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes. “The theme of our center is the prevention and treatment of obesity. It involves nutrition, but it also involves other lifestyle interventions and medical treatments.”
There are 11 Nutrition Obesity Research Centers across the country that are funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The Colorado NORC, supported by a roughly $4 million federal grant, covers the Rocky Mountain region. Established in 1995 as a Clinical Nutrition Research Unit, the NORC research base has evolved over the past 30 years to now have 125 regular members from 44 academic units at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus and its partnering institutions, which include CU Boulder, CU Denver, Colorado State University, and the University of Utah.
Colorado NORC members have an annual funding portfolio of $65 million in grants related to nutrition and obesity research, with funding coming from various institutions including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and numerous private research foundations.
“It’s hard to find a scientist where nutrition or obesity does not matter to their work,” MacLean says. “The NORC brings people from different disciplines together to learn, leverage our expertise and operations, and work collaboratively to look at all angles of how nutrition and obesity affect these diseases and conditions.”
The NORC has three biomedical research cores that cover the spectrum of science — from basic research to understand the biology behind health conditions to translational research that transfers lab findings into potential interventions for patients.
The Molecular and Cellular Analytical Core is a basic research core that includes fundamental investigations into the function of mitochondria and lipidomics. The Energy Balance Assessment Core, on the other hand, provides metabolic phenotyping for humans and animal models, measuring factors like energy expenditure, metabolism, and body composition.
The Clinical Intervention and Translation Core, which operates out of the CU Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, helps researchers with a variety of clinical and translational research studies. The core can assist with executing dietary interventions, physical activity interventions, and behavioral interventions, as well as help implement interventions in the patient population as part of clinical trials.
The NORC also has two programs — an enrichment program that offers educational opportunities to hear about the latest advances on obesity and nutrition research and a pilot and feasibility program in which the center offers annual research awards to early-career investigators to support them in advancing their research and professional career.
“Thirty years ago, we started with around 42 faculty, and we now have 125 members from five different schools and colleges and 73 NORC associates, who are trainees who do not use the cores but may engage in our programs,” MacLean says. “Our center now has a big impact here on campus.”
MacLean was recruited to join the NORC roughly 20 years ago by the former director. He initially joined as the associate director of the Energy Balance Assessment Core, where he worked to advance the NORC’s capabilities in studying small animal models of obesity and diabetes.
“I became more and more involved, and when the NORC director left his position, I was eager to step into that role and provide a new vision for growth and development,” MacLean says.
When he was appointed to the role of director in 2019, the NORC was in transition and ready for a change, he says. One of his first steps was working to secure an institutional investment to reorganize the operation of the cores and programs.
“Although the NORC has grown over the past 30 years, our federal funding hasn’t changed,” he says. “The most important job I have is partnering with institutional organizations to bring more funding so that we can continue to invest in our faculty, keep our cores up to date, and ensure we have state-of-the-art measures in our research.”
A key example of the collaborative team science the NORC supports is an NIH-funded research program called the Colorado Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex Differences, led by Wendy Kohrt, PhD, director of the Energy Balance Assessment Core and a distinguished professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine.
“The Colorado SCORE is examining the bioenergetic and cardiometabolic consequences of the loss of ovarian function,” he says. “We’re most interested in the menopausal transition and what happens with energy balance and metabolic health when women go through menopause.”
As part of the Colorado SCORE, MacLean is working on a pre-clinical project where he is investigating how exercise affects energy balance in males and females differently, how the loss of ovarian function affects physical activity, and how estrogen mimics some of the beneficial effects of exercise.
“Kerrie Moreau, PhD, another SCORE colleague working with Wendy, runs clinical studies with an innovative approach to examine how the loss of ovarian function affects vascular health,” he says. “All of our NORC biomedical research cores essentially contribute to supporting this grant. The work involves basic science, pre-clinical science, and clinical science, all coming together around the topic of the loss of ovarian function.”
Collaborations are not only happening within the NORC’s cores — the center is also working to build research partnerships with other research centers, such as the CU Cancer Center, the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, the CU Diabetes Research Center, and the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research.
“On our campus, we have the opportunity to work with a number of the great research centers on our campus to create synergy in advancing the science of nutrition and obesity. For me, it’s all about bringing people together with a shared vision for interdisciplinary, collaborative team science,” MacLean says.
Looking ahead, the Colorado NORC is expanding its ongoing collaboration with the CU Cancer Center’s clinical operations in oncology through the BfedBwell nutrition program and the BfitBwell exercise program for cancer survivors to help them adopt a healthier lifestyle.
MacLean also hopes to see the NORC’s Clinical Intervention and Translation Core build a stronger partnership with the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS). Janine Higgins, PhD, a professor of medicine and the director of the Clinical Intervention Translation Core, is leading this collaboration, which aims to help researchers translate and implement their findings into the broader community.
“In our field, the days of running your own research program in isolation have passed,” MacLean says. “If you want to be successful, it’s really about building a research team that merges expertise from different disciplines. Collaboration creates innovation and synergy.
“When you bring people with different ideas and perspectives together, they will challenge each other, and that leads to bigger steps in advancing science.”