Diabetes
Research
Unlocking biomarkers, protecting β-cells, and advancing diabetes therapies
Diabetes is a devastating disease that occurs when the islets of the pancreas do not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces. As a consequence, diabetic patients lose the ability to regulate their own blood glucose and suffer from chronic hyperglycemia (high glucose levels in the blood) which in turn can lead to multi-organ damage. Diabetes is by nature a very heterogenous disease, where multiple factors, inherited and acquired, contribute to the onset of the disease, which makes generalizable disease mechanisms very difficult to identify or even unlikely to exist.
Progress in this area is hindered in part by the limited availability of research models that accurately recapitulate human disease development and therapeutic response.
Although various cell culture systems and mouse models are currently used to investigate pancreatic beta-cell loss, their limited comparability to human pathology is now well recognized. This highlights the pressing need for innovative experimental approaches to enable the development of more effective therapeutic interventions.
To address these shortcomings in diabetes research, we at CBmed deploy a unique, patient-centred approach to scale disease modelling in diabetic patients to account for the heterogenous nature of diabetes in the pursuit of potential cures.
