“We are delighted that this endowment will fulfill our parents’ plan for this money to not go for a ‘thing,’ but rather toward people,” Lynne Wolfe said.

The number of adults living with diabetes has surpassed 800 million, and the World Health Organization has called the escalating prevalence of Type 2 diabetes an epidemic.

An interim plan has been announced to fill the roles held by Alvin C. Powers, MD, in Vanderbilt’s Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism.

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.