Honolulu ARCS Scholar Katie C.Y. Lee has demonstrated the importance of an energy regulating enzyme in heart health. “We discovered that your heart can't really be healthy without PKM2,” she says.
Building on research that Pyruvate kinase M2 plays a key role in glucose metabolism and energy expenditure, Katie demonstrated that loss of the enzyme led to altered glucose metabolism, diminished mitochondrial function, and increased presence of harmful reactive oxygen species molecules in mouse hearts.
“Although loss of PKM2 did not impair baseline contractility, its absence may make hearts more sensitive to environmental stress or injury,” she reports in the September 10 issue of Physiological Reports.
Katie received the 2022 George and Mona Elmore ARCS Scholar Award in Medicine. She is a PhD student in Cell and Molecular Biology and part of Dr. Ralph Shohet's Center for Cardiovascular Research at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa's John A. Burns School of Medicine. (Note: Katie's husband, Ken Awamura, is a 2024 ARCS Scholar in Tropical Medicine at JABSOM.)
Learn more about Katie's discovery or read the Physiological Reports article. Listen to her talk about her heart research in her 2022 ARCS Scholar video.
