Diabetes mellitus is a global epidemic of increasingly severe magnitude. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2025, 30 million people worldwide will suffer from Type 1 diabetes, and 300 million people with Type 2 diabetes. As the leading cause of heart disease, renal failure, blindness and lower limb amputation in the world, diabetes has been classified by WHO as one of the major threats to human health in the 21st century. Treatment of diabetes by transplantation of insulin-producing pancreatic β-cells has recently become possible, but is severely limited by the availability of donor tissue. Hence, new sources of insulin-producing cells are in great demand.
Research in our group is focused on the developmental biology of the pancreas. We wish to understand how the pancreas normally develops and use that information to grow and develop pancreatic cells (Islets of Langerhans) in culture. One goal of this project is to explain how vertebrates make an organ from undifferentiated embryonic cells. Another longer-term goal has practical significance: if our studies are successful, it should be possible to apply our conclusions to human cells and provide a source of insulin producing ß cells for transplantation into diabetics.
At present, the majority of our studies are done with mice and rat diabetic models. We use a wide variety of techniques including analysis of developmental genetics for direct assays of gene function, Cell culture and differentiation of embryonic and adult stem cells based on their potential to produce different kinds of cells. The aim of all our experiments is to understand the genes, cells, and tissues that direct pancreatic organogenesis and use them in clinical application.