“Previous studies by our group found that leptin replacement therapy reversed diabetes and insulin resistance in patients with severe lipodystophy — a loss of fatty tissue that leads to those disorders — by reducing fat deposits in the liver and skeletal muscle,” says senior author Dr. Gerald Shulman, the George Cowgill Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology) and Cellular & Molecular Physiology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “These new data provide an additional mechanism by which leptin therapy reverses hepatic insulin resistance and hyperglycemia in animal models of poorly controlled type 1 and type 2 diabetes.”