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Newswise PHILADELPHIA Penn Medicine will receive $3.5 million over the next five years to establish a National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) consortium to study new ways to treat diabetes. The program will be led by Klaus H. Kaestner, PhD, the Thomas and Evelyn Suor Butterworth Professor in Genetics and an investigator with the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. The consortium is a joint effort between the Kaestner lab and that of Benjamin Glaser, MD, head of the Endocrinology and Metabolism Service, Department of Internal Medicine, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel.

This award will enable us to continue a fruitful collaboration begun four years ago during a sabbatical stay in Jerusalem, says Kaestner. By leveraging Dr. Glasers clinical expertise with the technology development ongoing in my lab we hope to make rapid progress towards new treatments for diabetes.

The prevalence of diabetes has reached epidemic proportions worldwide and is predicted to increase rapidly in the future, putting a tremendous strain on health care budgets in both developed and developing countries. There are two major forms of diabetes and both are associated with decreased beta cell number or function, explains Kaestner. No treatments have been devised that increase beta cells in humans, and transplantation of beta cells is extremely limited due to lack of appropriate donors. For these reasons, increasing functional beta cells before or after transplantation has become a primary objective of diabetes research.

The teams previous studies have shown that adult human beta cells can be induced to replicate, and importantly, that these cells can maintain a normal response to glucose levels. However, the replication rate achieved is still too low for clinical applications.

The team aims to develop better ways to increase functional beta cells by inducing replication of adult beta cells, and by restoring juvenile properties to aged beta cells. To accomplish these aims, they will use cutting-edge and emerging technologies that are already established or are being developed. They will combine clinical experience with expertise in molecular biology and extensive experience in genomic modification aimed at enhancing beta-cell replication. By basing interventions on changes found in human disease and normal aging, this approach will increase the chances that discoveries made can be translated more rapidly into clinically relevant protocols.

The NIDDK grant is 1UC4DK104119-01.

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Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.

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Penn Medicine Receives $3.5 Million NIH Grant to Study New Ways to Combat Diabetes