Penn Medicine to receive $3.5M grant to combat diabetes

Penn Medicine recently announced it will receive $3.5 million from the NIH during the next 5 years to form a National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases consortium to study new ways to treat diabetes, according to a press release.

The program will be led by Klaus H. Kaestner, PhD, the Thomas and Evelyn Suor Butterworth professor in genetics and an investigator for the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, and his lab will collaborate with the lab of Benjamin Glaser, MD, head of the endocrinology and metabolism service in the department of internal medicine at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem.

“This award will enable us to continue a fruitful collaboration begun 4 years ago during a sabbatical stay in Jerusalem,” Kaestner said in the release. “By leveraging Dr. Glaser’s clinical expertise with the technology development ongoing in my lab, we hope to make rapid progress toward new treatments for diabetes.”

Previous studies conducted by the team have shown that adult human beta cells can be induced to replicate and are able to maintain a normal response to glucose levels.

The team plans to use cutting-edge and emerging technologies that are already established or being developed to find better ways to increase functional beta cells by inducing replication of adult beta cells and restoring juvenile properties to aged beta cells.

“There are two major forms of diabetes and both are associated with increased beta-cell number or function,” Kaestner said. “No treatments have been devised that increase beta cells in humans, and transplantation of beta cells is extremely limited due to lack of appropriate donors. For these reasons, increasing functional beta cells before or after transplantation has become a primary objective of diabetes research.”