Our research focuses on the cause of diabetes and on possibilities to prevent and cure the disease.
Diabetes mellitus is a lifelong, incapacitating disease affecting multiple organs. Estimates of worldwide prevalence suggest that 250 million patients have diabetes today and that this number by 2025 will increase by fifty percent. In Sweden, at least 500,000 persons suffer from diabetes today.
Presently, diabetes can neither be prevented nor cured and the disease is associated with devastating chronic complications. Diabetes and its complications impose an immense burden on the quality of life of patients and account for more than ten percent of health care costs in Sweden.
Although type 2 diabetes accounts for most of the diabetes epidemic, type 1 diabetes (TID) is in Sweden the most common chronic disorder in children. More than two children per day are diagnosed with T1D, reaching more than 800 patients per year. In Finland one child out of 123 will be diagnosed with T1D before the age of 15 years. The figures are frightening and for unknown reasons the incidence of T1D has doubled during the past twenty years and continues to increase by four to six percent per year.
Studies of pancreatic islets
Our research has a broad multidisciplinary translational approach, which integrates genetics, bioinformatics, physiology, cell biology, clinical immunology, diabetology and transplantation research. The aim is to clarify the etiology of TID and to pave the way for development of new strategies for prevention and cure of TID.
In one of our projects we use pancreases from organ donors to examine the etiology of diabetes. Another project focuses on the possibility to halt or prevent T1D in newly diagnosed patients by transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells with unique immunosuppressive capacities.
We also develop antibody-based proteomics for discovery and exploration of proteins expressed in pancreatic islets in order to make PET/CT imaging of the beta cells possible. Transplantation of isolated islets may be an option to cure patients with the most severe forms of T1D and our research includes efforts that aim at increasing the survival of transplanted islets.
In a related project we study regulatory T cells for treatment of transplantation induced immune reactions.
Read more about our projects:
- The etiology of TID
- Transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells to prevent TID
- Imaging pancreatic islets by detection of islet specific proteins
- Development of islet transplantation to cure TID
- Regulation of transplantation induced ímmune reactions
