I am searching for Which would be the top 5 Reserach centers for the Following, to Include in My ( and recommend to others) Wills…

1. Retinopathy
2. T1 Diabetes For a Cure

And after reseraching both the ADA and JDRF, am not interested in them at this time. They take too much money out and divert it to other programs, not related to a cure.

Would this NYC RI be one to add to the list?

Thank you for your Ideas..
Dennis

1) The consensus seems to be that in order to truly cure type 1, a multi-pronged approach will be necessary — some of this have long been advocated by the diabetes community, only to be written off as researchers pursued islet transplantation and other remedies that addressed only one piece of the total problem.

First is a treatment to stop autoimmunity, then beyond that, something will be necessary to expand the beta cell mass to a level sufficient for insulin independence. While some people are hopeful that once autoimmunity goes away that the beta cells will simply regenerate themselves, the evidence suggests that we’ll need to supplement them if patients are to become insulin independent.

Another interesting take-away is the fact that Byetta (exenatide) which is a very popular type 2 treatment has actually been shown to increase beta cell mass. Studies will soon be undertaken with recently diagnosed type 1 patients to combine monoclonal antibody treatment (similar to what has been done by UCSF’s De. Jeffrey Bluestone) along with treatment with Byetta. The idea behind it is that newly diagnosed patients still have considerable beta cell mass remaining (at least 10%) therefore once the autoimmunity is addressed, then Byetta may help the last remaining cells replicate, thereby addressing 2 major problems.

Cheers,
Felix.

Today Amy at Diabetes Mine posted a brief overview of promising research. She covers Preserving Beta Cells, Islet Cell Transplantation, Tissue Engineering (my favorite), and Stem Cell Research. Check it out!…