Ruas lab
Exercise is medicine
About Us.
Welcome to Ruas Lab! Since 2011, our research has focused on the molecules that mediate the beneficial effects of physical activity and exercise to human health. Our passionate team is eager to explore how fitness can enhance our well-being. Join in our mission to inspire healthier lifestyles through groundbreaking discoveries!
Focus & Goals...
We want to help create exercise-based therapeutics
Our laboratory is dedicated to discovering what key molecules mediate the beneficial effects of exercise and through these findings help create future exercise-based medications.
When you exercise, your muscles produce substances with important health benefits!
Physical exercise and muscle condition play an important role in disease prevention and treatment. In part, because you use excess energy stored in your body, and in part because contracting muscles release factors (myokines) that promote a healthy mind and a healthy body.
Staying physically active is the key to healthy aging. But why?
Sedentary lifestyles with low levels of physical activity come at a high cost to our health and have been linked to the incidence of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, neuro-degenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s), mood disorders (e.g. depression), and even cancer.
OUR MISSION
To identify the molecules that mediate the beneficial effects of physical exercise on human health
Metabolism & Exercise
How do tissues such as muscle, liver, and fat produce, use, or store energy to function in health and during metabolic diseases?
Muscle mass & function
What are the pathways that maintain adequate muscle mass, strength and recovery that are dysregulated in many diseases?
Inter-organ communication
Identifying the molecular mediators of the beneficial effects of physical exercise, and developing as a novel generation of therapeutics.