SYDNEY: Why does our brain not regulate or suppress obesity and hypertension? - and what's the link with diabetes? These are some of the questions that earned Michael Cowley the 2009 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.

Cowley is a research professor at Monash university in Melbourne, Australia. As a student, he travelled to Africa to investigate population control in elephants, and then went on to complete a PhD on how the brain controls reproduction. This eventually led him to consider how our brains control metabolism.

Although our bodies have a remarkable ability to balance consumption and energy output, almost two and half million Australians are obese.

“In evolutionary terms it’s good to put on weight,” says Cowley, “Over the millennia our ancestors have needed reserves to survive famine.” The problem today is that we have easy access to all the food we want and lead relatively inactive lifestyles.

While working at Oregon Health and Science University, in Portland, USA, Cowley identified neurons in the brain that respond to leptin - a hormone that regulates body weight by activating either neurons that suppress or increase appetite.

He also developed an ingenious method, now used by neuroscientists across the world, to study the actions of hormones in single living nerve cells within slices of brain tissue.

Through these studies, Cowley has been able to answer questions about how our brain loses touch with our fat and glucose reserves or blood sugar levels, leading to obesity and diabetes.

Cowley has worked with mice and monkeys for the past decade, and done clinical studies on humans, which has helped him pinpoint prospective targets for therapy. He has also created a map of the neural circuits involved in controlling body weight.

He has invented ten groups of patent applications, with 85 patents to date, and his company, Orexigen Therapeutics, has two potential drugs for obesity underway.