Dr. Sergio Wehinger Wehinger Biography
Dr. Sergio Wehinger Wehinger, born in the city of Curicó, began his university studies at the University of Talca, where he graduated in Medical Technology in 1999, obtaining the Antonio Encina Armanet award for being the graduate with the highest qualification of his generation. Later, he served as technical director of a clinical laboratory in Curicó. After that, he was integrated as an academic at the University of Talca, where he began to teach in 2003 in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
In 2005, he began his doctoral studies in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Chile, where in his doctoral thesis, performed in the Laboratory of Cellular Communications with Dr. Andrew Quest, found a relevant role of the protein caveolin-1 in the mechanism of cell death induced by high levels of free fatty acids, using as a model, mouse pancreatic beta cells, which was published in 2015 in the journal “Biochimica et Biophysica Acta”.
He has participated in publications and book chapters, developing as a topic, the importance of oxidative stress in cellular metabolism and its role in chronic diseases such as metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes mellitus. Recently, in 2016, he was awarded a FONDECYT Initiation in Research project, where he studies the role of MAP kinase enzymes on the mechanism of lipotoxicity-induced damage in pancreatic beta cells of mouse islets, which is potentiated by caveolin-1.
Research lines
- Study of the mechanisms of pancreatic beta cell dysfunction and cell death by toxic stimuli such as high levels of free fatty acids and oxidative stress and its association with Insulin resistance and diabetes
- Study of antioxidant and cytoprotective activity in compounds present in extracts of natural origin
Selected references
- Sebastian Zagmutt, Elba Leiva, Veronica Mujica, Sergio Wehinger, Protective Effect of Propolis Extract on Pancreatic Beta Cell Under Oxidative Stress In Vitro. Journal of Food and Nutrition Research. Vol. 4, No. 6, 2016, pp 400-407.
doi: 10.12691/jfnr-4-6-9 - Sergio Wehinger, Rina Ortiz, MarÃa Inés DÃaz, Adam Aguirre, Manuel Valenzuela, Paola Llanos, Christopher Mc Master, Lisette Leyton, Andrew Quest, Phosphorylation of caveolin-1 on tyrosine-14 induced by ROS enhances palmitate-induced death of beta-pancreatic cells, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Molecular Basis of Disease, Volume 1852, Issue 5, May 2015, Pages 693–708, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2014.12.021
