News & Research

    Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York

Exploring the Role of Hepatocyte Nuclear Factor 4 Alpha in Human Beta Cell Generation and Function

General Research Subject: Type 2 Diabetes

Focus: Stem Cell Research\Human\Adult

Type of Grant: Junior Faculty

Project Start Date: January 1, 2012

Project End Date: December 31, 2014

Research Profile

What area of diabetes research does your project cover? What role will this particular project play in preventing, treating and/or curing diabetes?

We are working on disease modeling of type-2 diabetes. We will build up "disease in a dish" platforms to study the mechanism and perform drug discovery for the treatment of diabetes patients.

If a person with diabetes were to ask you how your project will help them in the future, how would you respond?

We are establishing novel platform to model diabetes. Our long-term goal is to identify new drug candidates that can be used to treat type-2 diabetes.

Why is it important for you, personally, to become involved in diabetes research? What role will this award play in your research efforts?

This award will enable me to further develop my experience and skills in the diabetes field. The platform established in the study supported by this award will help us move our research closer to diabetes-related translational research and drug discovery, which is our long-term goal. In addition, this award will help us to establish the foundation to use hiPSC/hESC-derived cells as a platform to study diabetes. Using the foundations established using this award, we will expand our research to study common type-2 diabetes patient and identify new targets and/or candidates that can be used for drug discovery of diabetes.

In what direction do you see the future of diabetes research going?

One of the future directions of type-2 diabetes research is to develop novel approach to prevent the progression of diabetes. Although more than 100 million American were diagnosed with insulin resistance. Only 20-30% individuals with insulin resistance progress to type-2 diabetes. It is important for scientists to understand the factors that affect the progression of type-2 diabetes and create novel approaches to prevent the progression of type-2 diabetes. Another future direction of type-2 diabetes research is to develop personalized medicine. Although all diabetes patients were diagnosed with hyperglycemia, the causes are different in each patient. It is important to develop personalized medicine for the treatment of individual patient.