The Regents Professor in the University of Arizona Department of Chemistry, Hruby also is a professor of neuroscience, biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the university and the Arizona Research Laboratory. He and his collaborators began studying MSH in the 1970s, and have developed several hundred derivatives of the hormone over the past 35 years.

I tell my students we ™re living in a revolutionary time, he says. Who knows what we ™ll discover tomorrow, because it ™s clear there are lots of unknowns. It gets more exciting all the time, and I feel almost like I ™m starting over again.

A scientific paper on the work by Brennan and Hochgeschewender titled Altered Glucose Homeostasis in POMC-Null Mouse Mutants Lacking Central and Peripheral Melanocrotin, was published in the Dec. 2003 issue of Endocrinology.

The next step is licensing the discovery and working with a pharmaceutical company to develop and test clinical therapies. Previously, Brennan and Hochgeschewender, who have collaborated since 1986, have patented mice with a range of genetic modifications to the POMC gene (U.S. Patent # 6,603,058), and a method of reducing insulin resistance (U.S. Patent #6,689,938) that could lead to potential treatments for diabetes accompanying obesity.

Denver ™s Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (ERI) was founded in 1961 as a private, independent research center. ERI merged with the University of Denver in 2003. The Institute is staffed by scientists who study Down syndrome, Lou Gehrig ™s disease, cancer, obesity, type II diabetes and other diseases and conditions. dickjonescomm/