Leading investigators in diabetes, pancreas and islet biology, and computational biology have received $12.5 million in two five-year awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create the world’s first, integrated knowledge base of human-derived tissue- and cellular-level pancreatic information to support innovative, collaborative and reproducible research.

During her Discovery Lecture on March 21, Professor Dame Frances Ashcroft, recipient of the 2023 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science, spoke on the joy science has given her.

The study, which included more than 5,000 volunteers with Type 2 diabetes from diverse racial and ethnic groups, compared the treatments insulin glargine, liraglutide, glimepiride and sitagliptin.

The study findings, published in the journal Diabetes Care, suggest that pancreas imaging can have a benefit in tracking disease development and recruitment for preventive and therapeutic trials.

Genetic analyses suggest that branched chain amino acids may be a sensitive biomarker of early or subclinical Type 2 diabetes and could be used to identify risk and implement preventive measures.

A comprehensive study that integrates multiple analytic approaches has linked a regulatory gene network and functional defects in insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells to Type 2 diabetes.