Lectures and seminars SRP Diabetes Seminar: “Adipose tissue heterogeneity and metabolic health”

Adipose tissue was long considered a passive lipid store, but work over the past decade has fundamentally revised this view. Through single-cell and single-nucleus approaches it became clear, that virtually every cell type within adipose tissue, adipocytes, progenitor cells, stromal cells is far more heterogeneous than previously appreciated, and that specific subpopulations, rather than bulk tissue properties, are the drivers of metabolic health and disease.

A recurring theme in this work is that the critical heterogeneity is often found where you least expect it. Recent work on mesothelium, the serosal lining of visceral fat, classically regarded as a passive barrier shows that this is a highly plastic population organised along a transition continuum, and that the balance of its states tracks metabolic health independently of adiposity. Its transition toward a myofibroblast-like phenotype emerges as a key cellular mechanism linking visceral obesity to tissue fibrosis and dysfunction.

Taken together, these findings argue that to understand why some individuals with obesity remain metabolically healthy while others do not, we need to move beyond adipocyte-centric models and map the full cellular ecosystem of the tissue, including its periphery.

“Adipose tissue heterogeneity and metabolic health”

Prof. Christian Wolfrum

Nanyang Technological University - Singapore

Date: 2^nd September 2026

Time: 16:00 

Place: Eva & Georg Klein lecture hall, Biomedicum, Solnavägen 9, Solna.

Host: Prof. Kirsty Spalding (kirsty.spalding@ki.se)