NDRI Hosts Landmark Conference on New Discoveries in the Genetics of Diabetes
NDRI announced today it will host a groundbreaking conference with leading national and international scientists who will identify for the first time discoveries of new types of diabetes and explore promising new treatment therapies for diabetes patients. The conference, “Therapeutic Insights from New Diabetes Gene Discoveries,” will be held March 18-19 in Philadelphia. Top international investigators from academia and industry who are among the best and brightest in their fields will be presenting on the program.
Conference Co-organizers include: Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, and 2007 recipient of The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor a President can bestow; David Altshuler, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Genetics and Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Director, Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT; Christopher P. Austin, M.D., Director, NIH Chemical Genomics Center in the Office of the Director at NIH; Andrew Hattersley, D.M., F.R.C.P., Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Science at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, UK; Stuart L. Schreiber, Ph.D., Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT; and John Todd, Ph.D., FMedSci, Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge University, UK, and Director of the JDRF/WT Diabetes & Inflammation Laboratory at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.
“The primary focus of the conference will be to translate new genetic discoveries into improved therapy for patients,” said Lee Ducat, President and founder of NDRI and founder and first president of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. “The conference is revolutionary in light of recent new discoveries of the subtypes of Type I and Type II diabetes and will be groundbreaking in terms of recommendations vital for future new therapies.”
“After many years of frustration searching for genetic factors that contribute to the risk of Type I and Type II diabetes, the logjam has broken,” said Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “The combination of the elegant map of human genetic variation produced by the International HapMap Project, together with dramatic decreases in the cost of doing DNA analysis, has made it possible to scan the entire human genome for genetic risk factors for diabetes. No longer do investigators have to content themselves with testing ‘candidate genes’ — they can look at the whole DNA instruction book.”
According to Dr. Collins, the result is more than a dozen new gene discoveries that have been quickly verified. “Each one of these new findings points to a previously unknown pathway that is fundamentally important in Type I or Type II diabetes, opening up an entirely new set of opportunities in therapeutics,” he said.
Conference attendees will include NIH scientists, representatives of the diabetes voluntary health community, congressional staff, and members of the NDRI board of directors and scientific advisors. The conference may be co-sponsored by various institutes of the NIH, as well as voluntary health organizations and the pharmaceutical community.
An Awards Dinner will be held March 18 at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall honoring scientists who will receive the NDRI Distinguished Scientist Award 2008. Award winners are John Todd, Ph.D., for his discoveries in Type I diabetes; David Altshuler, M.D., Ph.D., for his outstanding research into the genetics of Type II diabetes; and Andrew Hattersley, D.M., F.R.C.P., for his breakthrough research into the discovery of the genes for Monogenic/Neonatal diabetes. The awards will be presented by Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Hal Broxmeyer, Ph.D., and Lee Ducat. Guests of honor will include the officers of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Diabetes Research Institute and the American Diabetes Association.
To register for the conference, visit the NDRI website at www.ndriresource.org or call NDRI at 800-222-6374.
About NDRI
The nonprofit NDRI (National Disease Research Interchange) was established in 1980 to provide scientists with the human tissue necessary to study human systems and human disease. In the past 20 years, NDRI has served some 5,000 scientists with more than 200,000 human biomaterials, leading to more than 2,500 papers published in scholarly journals on diseases from diabetes to cancer to HIV and rare diseases.
Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NDRI provides biomaterials to more than 200 of the nation’s most prominent academic-based research centers including the Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Stanford University, and Thomas Jefferson University, among others. NDRI also provides tissues to government agencies and grantees including the NIH, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, The Centers for Disease Control, and to some of the nation’s top pharma, biotech and R&D programs.