The Role of PTP-1B in Vascular Insulin Resistance

Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that insulin resistance in the vasculature can be linked to cardiovascular complications. However, the mechanism of insulin resistance which occurs in blood vessels is not well understood. Previous studies have shown that Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase -IB (PTP-1B) is a negative regulator of insulin signaling, however, the role of PTP-1B in regulating insulin signaling in the vasculature has never been explored. We hypothesized that PTP-1B plays an important role in vascular insulin resistance both in vitro and in vivo. For in vitro experiments, we utilized the model of angiotensin II (Ang II)-induced insulin resistance in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) and hypothesized that Ang II-induced activation of PTP-1B is the underlying mechanism. Using standard Western techniques, we found that Ang II significantly inhibited insulin-induced phosphorylation of IRS-1 and Akt, downstream members the insulin-induced anti-mitogenic pathway. Furthermore, Ang II enhanced the insulin-induced activation of p42/p44 MAPK, a mitogenic pathway. In addition, we found that PTP-1B is involved in the insulin-induced blockade of Ang II-induced VSMC growth. Finally, we also showed that Ang II induced activation of PTP-1B in VSMC was through a PKA/JAK2 dependent mechanism. Therefore, from these in vitro studies, we conclude that Ang II modulates both anti-mitogenic and mitogenic pathways stimulated by insulin via activation of PTP-1B. For the in vivo studies, we hypothesized that PTP- 1B is an underlying mechanism of vascular insulin resistance in animal models. Experiments were conducted on PTP-1B knockout (PTP-1B KO) mice compared to wild type (WT) mice in different insulin resistant conditions. In high fat feeding induced obesity, we showed that the activation of Akt following insulin stimulation ex vivo was significantly decreased in high fat fed WT mice which was restored by deletion of PTP- 1B. However, the expression of PTP-1B was not different between WT mice on either regular or high fat diet. We concluded that PTP-1B partly plays a role in vascular insulin resistance in high fat fed model. We next examined the roles of PTP-1B and vascular insulin resistance in a new double transgenic obese model. We showed here that the expression of PTP-1B was increased significantly in obese control mice (K^HPTP-IB) compared to lean control mice. Activation of Akt following insulin injection was impaired in aorta of obese KdbHpTP-iB mice and was not restored by deletion of PTP-1B. Therefore, our data suggest that other insulin induced signaling molecules in the aortamay be involved in the regulation of Akt and not PTP-1B. Overall, our studies in this thesis suggest both an in vivo and in vitro contributionof PTP-1B to vascular insulin resistance. The overall goal of the study was to determine the significance of PTP-1B in the development of vascular insulin resistance particularly in vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC). We hypothesized that PTP-1B plays an important role in vascular insulin resistance both in vitro and in vivo.