Energy Transfer and Metabolism

The failing heart is energy-deprived despite an abundance of substrates, whereas cancer cells exploit metabolic pathways to redirect energy transfer to promote its growth at the expense of healthy tissue. At the Energy Transfer and Metabolism Lab, we seek to unravel how humans and other organisms optimize production of the metabolic fuel adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which powers every cell in our body. Specifically, our lab aims to study the quantum physics of mitochondrial electron and proton transport.

We hypothesize that an organism's evolved, or otherwise mutated, electron transfer system components play key roles in determining its distinct temperature profile for mitochondrial ATP production. We also study methods for ‘re-energizing’ energy-deprived organs, including highly innovative techniques such as transfer of functional healthy mitochondria into energy-altered tissue like the failing cardiomyocyte or growing neoplastic cells.

Our Team:

• Dale Hamilton, MD – Director and Principal Investigator
  Hamilton, is the director of the Center for Bioenergetics and a consulting faculty physician in the division of endocrinology and diabetes of the Department of Medicine at Houston Methodist. He is also a professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

   

  Hamilton’s early education at the University of Washington was in cellular and molecular biology where he graduated with honors. He then attended St. Louis University Medical School and completed residency and post-doctoral fellowship training in internal medicine and endocrinology at Baylor College of Medicine. His early to mid-professional career activities combined clinical practice and graduate medical education.

   

  The transition to translational research for Hamilton began in 2002 when he participated in collaborations in clinical trials and orthotopic human islet transplantation research. In 2007, his research focus narrowed to translational investigations related to substrate oxidation and energy transfer in failing organ systems such as the human heart and neoplastic conditions. In 2013 in collaboration with Anisha Gupte, PhD, he established a bioenergetics research initiative at Houston Methodist Research Institute with the objective of identifying mechanisms of altered energy transduction in disease states, especially those involving high energy tissues. The initiative has now evolved into the Center for Bioenergetics, which supports several faculty and their research groups studying various aspects of energy transfer and metabolism.