Dean identified a liver-alpha cell axis (LACA), a crosstalk between liver glucagon signaling and alpha cell sensing of amino acids.

“As I worked at Vanderbilt, I became so attached to the division, and when I had the ability to do it, I wanted to give back.”

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.

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.

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.

Alvin C. Powers, MD, Joe C. Davis Professor of Biologic Science and professor of Medicine, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, has received the 2023 William S. Middleton Award, the highest honor awarded by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development Service.