Finally, a press release that is unquestionably post-worthy: on Friday, the legendary Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston announced that it’s received a million-dollar grant to support type 1 diabetes research.
The money comes from a wealthy patient with his own philanthropic organization: the Thomas J. Beatson, Jr. 
Foundation. Beatson lives in Phoenix, AZ, and is also a Joslin Medalist for living with type 1 diabetes for 50 or more years. He’s given funds to the Center before, but what’s interesting about this time is the four-pronged research approach:
This time, Beatson asked four leading investigators — T. Keith Blackwell, M.D., Ph.D.; George L. King, M.D.; Gordon C. Weir, M.D., and Howard A. Wolpert, M.D. — to present him with compelling research proposals.
“Inspired by all four, he decided to help fund each… Each lab will receive $250,000 over two years.”
Wow!
So the money is going to cutting-edge research in four different directions:
Dr. Blackwell – research on deriving new beta cells for transplantation (focus on focuses on how the developmental potential of stem cells might be harnessed to provide regenerative therapies for diabetes)
Dr. King – research into why Joslin Gold Medalists fare so well (they’ve developed a hypothesis that “it may be possible to improve metabolic regulation by inducing the proliferation of a patient’s own pancreatic cells in people who have lived with diabetes for more than 15 years” – !)
Dr. Weir – research on sources of insulin-producing islet cells and ways to protect transplanted cells from being destroyed by autoimmunity or transplant rejection.
Dr. Wolpert – developing software to analyze continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data to make it more useful and powerful: pattern recognition algorithms; identifying problem areas, such as recurrent hypoglycemia, hyperglycemic events and post-meal patterns that point to a need for therapy adjustments; and determining if the alarms of CGM devices are set optimally to detect frequent out-of-target glucose measurements.
Wow, again! I love how these topics split evenly into 2 addressing research toward a CURE, and 2 taking on TREATMENT in the here and now.
Read all the details at Joslin’s website. Happy New Year, indeed!
Great news! The Joslin folks are on my list of approval for working toward a cure for Type 1, not just talking about it! Thanks for sharing the info!
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I’m not sure if I saw it here in your weekly nuggets or if I saw it somewhere else, but Richard Schulze, founder of Best Buy, gave the University of Minnesota a whopping $40 million ($8 million/year for the next 5 years) strictly for type 1 **CURE** research. It’s the largest gift from an individual or family foundation the University has received and the second largest gift ever (the school received $65 million for cancer research). Reportedly, Schulze’s daughter has type 1, which is part of his reason for giving the money. Let’s all hope that between this grant and the Joslin Center’s recent grant, a cure will come sooner rather than later.
Link to UM’s announcement:
http://www.mmf.umn.edu/news/diabetes.cfm
Link to article in the St. Paul Business Journal:
http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2008/12/08/daily39.html?ana=from_rss
Wow! This is all awesome news…and on my 39th birthday! In two weeks I’ll have had Type I for 28 years, and still going strong. Thanks for all the good news today folks!
happy birthday, xim! (i’ll hit 28 years this coming July and I’m 43 – greetings to my former urine-testers!)
PS here’s a link to the Jan. 7th broadcast of Nat’l Public Media’s “the Story” abt the parents (doctor & engineer) of a type 1 child diagnosed at infancy. It’s a good story & the silver lining is that the engineer parent is working hard to perfect the so-called artificial pancreas (the CGM/pump closed loop), and sees great progress in his work!
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_684_Caring_Parents.mp3/mediafile_view
enjoy.
Since this is my clinic, only here in the Syracuse area, I’m happy to read this. I think my doctor is right on top of all the latest information, and we often have conversations about things because I’m usually keeping up with all of it also. Great news indeed.
Dr. Wolpert was my doctor when I went to school in Boston — he literally wrote the book on pumping (which I still have). Although I’m not a fan of the current CGMs, the data we collected from a 4 day trial was incredibly useful.
I’m really glad this individual donor really took the time to assess what type of research these funds would be going towards — all of them worthy and have the right people working on them to make real, incremental progress.
Wow!!! That really cool. Research always is in need of such grants.