Our Science

Driving Ember’s brown fat discovery pipeline is a platform for identifying next-generation therapeutics that promote energy expenditure through the activation or expansion of brown adipose tissue (BAT).

Platform

Ember has built a host of unique and specialized expertise, including a broad suite of capabilities to monitor energy expenditure in cells, ex-vivo tissues and animals. The company has developed optimized screening protocols to identify potential positive and negative regulators of brown fat pathways.  Ember’s proprietary assays and screens allow for rapid evaluation of therapeutic potential in mouse diet induced obesity models.

The company has characterized multiple rodent, nonhuman primate and human brown fat cell lines to facilitate new target discovery and enable the translation of biological insights from mouse and non-human primate studies. In addition, Ember is identifying novel biomarkers and developing imaging technologies that will be useful for rapidly identifying and optimizing efficacious drugs early in preclinical and clinical development.

Lead Molecule

Ember’s lead molecule is efficacious in the diet-induced obese mouse model and is progressing to a proof-of-concept studies in non-human primates. The mouse model results show that treatment of male and female DIO mice reduced body weight, primarily due to loss of fat tissue. The reduction in adipose tissue was concomitant with improvements in metabolic health, including improvements in glucose tolerance and serum lipid levels. Body weight loss with treatment was confirmed to be exclusively driven by an increase in energy expenditure, with no effect on food intake nor alterations to locomotor activity. End of study results demonstrated a reduction in the weight of the adipose pads, consistent with changes in whole body adiposity as detected by NMR. Clinical chemistry and hematology analysis did not identify any signals of toxicity in the DIO efficacy study.