The Cell Thermograft team was awarded BiomedX funding in 2013. Since then, the project has become a start-up named Ardent Cell Technologies, led by Dr. Brian Gillette (below). In late May, Dr. Gillette and his collaborators published a paper in Scientific Reports that described their fat burning technology.
Dr. Brian Gillettte
Here is how the technology would work: "An overweight person would go to a clinic for a simple procedure in which a small scrap of bad “white fat” tissue would be sucked out of his/her belly. Doctors would stick that piece of tissue into an automated bioreactor, where it would get a chemical bath for about three weeks. Within that machine, it would change into the good “brown fat” tissue that helps the body burn calories to stay warm. Then the patient would return to the clinic, and the scrap of tissue would be reinserted into his/her body. This transmogrified tissue would raise his metabolism and help him lose weight, even without the hard work of diet and exercise."
"In a paper published on Monday in Scientific Reports, Gillette and his collaborators describe their preliminary experiments. They showed that their conversion procedure, which doesn’t require any genetic engineering, works on both mouse and human fat tissue. They also injected converted tissue into mice, and showed that the tissue retained its brown fat qualities (rather than reverting to white fat) for the eight-week duration of the study." - Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum Article
Since this publication in Scientific Reports, the technology has been featured in The Guardian, IEEE Spectrum, Newsweek, BBC Radio, and Newsday.
