Director's Message
I am happy to invite you all to the first anniversary edition of the Stanford Diabetes Research Center (SDRC) newsletter! I’d like to start by extending a warm welcome to our newest SDRC members which include outstanding young investigators as well as world-renowned leaders in the field. SDRC treasures and thrives on the rich, collaborative environment fostered between its brilliant researchers who support our core mission of promoting innovation in diabetes research via multidisciplinary research partnerships. In the coming months, we anticipate bringing even more investigators into our community which is already 105 strong.
SDRC members have a robust track record of achieving world-wide recognition with their groundbreaking research studies, most recently exemplified by Dr. Kenneth Mahaffey, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford who was a recipient of the 2020 Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award for his recent clinical study ‘Canagliflozin and Renal Outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes and Nephropathy’ published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
I’d also like to use this opportunity to highlight the recent development of the SDRC Tissue Core under the umbrella of the SDRC Diabetes Clinical and Translational Core for the benefit of our new and existing SDRC members. The SDRC Tissue Core provides researchers with unprecedented access to a wide range of precious human donor tissues via a simplified, low-cost procurement option thanks to the efforts of Dr. Walter Park and Sharon Pneh.
The 4 core facilities of SDRC, The Islet Research Core managed by Dr. Yan Hang, the Clinical and translational Core managed by Christina Petlura and Sharon Pneh, the Genomics and Analysis Core run by Drs. Hassan Chaib and Ramesh Nair, and the Immune Monitoring Core led by Dr. Kent Jensen form an essential backbone of support for SDRC researchers in terms of providing technical expertise and training as reflected by their vibrant use by SDRC members and their contributions towards grant applications and in over 30 published papers in the last year alone.
The SDRC is committed to providing training and outreach opportunities to its younger investigators and trainees. In this context, I am pleased to report that several faculty members availed themselves of the recent SDRC Faculty Grant Writing Course which resulted in the successful funding of 15 grants including RO1, UO1, RO3 and R35 grants. The success of the course prompted us to conduct a second session in January 2020 which was well attended by a diverse group of investigators.
I am proud to bring your attention to the recently launched multidisciplinary Stanford Pancreatic Islet Transplantation and Immune Tolerance (SPIRIT) program spearheaded by an exemplary team of SDRC physicians and researchers in conjunction with Stanford Health Care. We anticipate that this program will be instrumental in promoting research and clinical efforts centered around immune tolerance and islet regeneration.
I am also honored for the opportunity to lead the new Northern California Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Center of Excellence (COE) with Dr. Mathias Hebrok at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). As co-directors of the COE, our goal is to usher in a new era of collaborations between Stanford and UCSF diabetes researchers to develop innovative preclinical and clinical therapeutic strategies for immune modulation and islet regeneration in type 1 diabetes.
Finally, I would like to applaud all of our members, trainees, core facility managers and students for their hard work and dedication to conducting the kind of high-quality, collaborative and multi-disciplinary research that has resulted in over 2000 member publications including 375 collaborative papers and 200 diabetes-related grants, more than 50 of which are ongoing research partnerships between members, since the inception of SDRC. I invite you to celebrate and support our vibrant community at our upcoming 5th Annual Frontiers in Diabetes Research Symposium on May 27, 2020!
Seung Kim, M.D., Ph.D.
Director of Stanford Diabetes Research Center
Professor, Developmental Biology and by courtesy of Medicine (Endocrinology)