News from the UMass Diabetes Center of Excellence

A Certified Child Life Specialist supports diabetic children and their families working with the care team to provide age appropriate support and interventions at UMass Memorial Medical Center. 

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is strongly associated with type 2 diabetes and obesity. It remains underdiagnosed and undertreated and many people living with T2D are unaware they have it.  A new project to create a screening tool and process in the UMass Memorial diabetes clinic will use clinically available data to determine patient risk of liver fibrosis.  

The 7th Diabetes Health Clinic for Worcester’s underserved community was held at Saint Francis Xavier Center in the Canal District. UMass DCOE providers and staff joined other volunteers from Vascular Surgery, Podiatry, Cardiology and Dermatology. All attendees received a foot exam, blood sugar, lipid & BMI testing, wound care and health resources.  They were also each given sneakers, socks and a hot meal. The first of these bi-annual multidisciplinary outreach clinics was on World Diabetes Day in 2020 and are now held every summer and in November during Diabetes Awareness Month.  

The foregut endoderm contributes to several organs including the thyroid, lungs, liver, and pancreas. Approaches to study it has been impeded by lack of tissue access and cellular models. A protocol to develop human pharyngeal endoderm from stem cells was published by the UMass Diabetes Center of Excellence laboratories of René Maehr, PhD and Michael Brehm, PhD at UMass Chan Medical School. 

The laboratory of vascular surgeon-scientist Tammy Nguyen, MD, PhD, developed a novel method in collaboration with Dr. Silvia Corvera’s lab to collect human stem cells directly from the bone marrow of people who underwent lower extremity amputations for non-healing wounds and grow them in her lab. Her research is examining why the immune cells of people living with diabetes behave differently than those without diabetes. In a newly published study, she identified that there are two different types of stem cell populations that are located within separate parts of bone marrow in the human leg. So far Dr. Nguyen has learned that stem cells derived from yellow/fatty marrow proliferate more and are more responsive. Currently she is asking additional questions in her lab to compare the marrow and immune cell development between people living with diabetes and those without diabetes.

A branch from the “Tree of Hippocrates” from an Oriental plane tree on the island of Kos, Greece was planted on the UMass Chan Medical School campus.  According to legend, Hippocrates of Kos, who is considered to be the father of medicine, educated his students near the tree more than 2,500 years ago. Three Diabetes Center of Excellence researchers spoke at the planting ceremony. 

John Haley, a PhD candidate in the Guertin lab, was named the 2023 Emerging Scientist in Metabolism by Weill Cornell Medicine.  He was awarded the top prize in a national competition for senior graduate students who are conducting metabolism research. Haley plans to pursue post-doctoral training focusing on the intersection of metabolism and signaling.

Shrewsbury High School Chemistry teacher Jennifer Cuddy spent a second summer in the Diabetes Center of Excellence research laboratories thanks to an American Association of Immunologists High School Teachers Program in Immunology Award.  She participated in studies investigating the effects of human immune cells on stem cell-derived pancreatic islets. The program provided Ms. Cuddy with new skills that she can incorporate into her high school classroom.  

The UMass Memorial adult diabetes clinic launched a Young Adult Clinic to help 18–26 year-olds who are struggling with any aspect of living with type 1 of type 2 diabetes. The care team includes an Endocrinologist, Nurse Practitioner and Diabetes Educator who explore the participant’s unique issues and create personalized care plans to help them achieve their health goals. Resources and peer to peer communication is included in the program.

Sam Redick, PhD, led the effort to develop and grow stem cell-derived islets at the UMass Chan Diabetes Center of Excellence for various collaborative research projects, including genetically engineering them to become undetected by the immune system. Transplanting stem cell-derived into a person living with type 1 diabetes, without them requiring toxic immunosuppressive therapy, would be a life-changing curative therapy.  That is the core focus of the JDRF Center of Excellence in New England led by UMass DCOE co-director Dr. David Harlan. Learn more about Sam and her T1D research

This study conducted in the Brehm & Greiner labs and published in the The Journal of Leukocyte Biology describes the creation of a novel “humanized” mouse model that enables specific targeting of the human toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) pathway in mice. These molecules help the immune system recognize infections and other harmful threats. Their new model allows scientists to test therapies in a human specific manner and show treatment efficacy against a human tumor.

Emilee Herringshaw is a UMass Chan Medical School student living with type 1 diabetes who is working towards a career in dermatology. She was awarded a clinical research grant by The American Contact Dermatitis Society to create a pilot study designed to evaluate skin reactions to continuous glucose monitors. Patients at the UMass Memorial Diabetes Center of Excellence are invited to participate and the data will be analyzed looking at all available devices, various scenarios & interventions.

The fourth annual Herman G. Berkman Diabetes Clinical Innovation Fund grant was awarded to optometrist Juan Ding, OD, PhD and co-investigator James Ledwith, MD, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. Their project titled "Efficacy and Impact of Implementing an AI Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Program in Family Medicine Clinics" offers a path to identify eye disease and improve comprehensive care for people living with diabetes.

Brown adipose tissue (fat tissue) is known to burn fat and improve metabolism while and white adipose tissue stores fat. Scientists are exploring cellular and molecular mechanisms that control brown fat, and how to convert white adipocytes into brown-like adipocytes. A newly published study in Nature Communications led by Qingbo Chen, PhD, describes a brown fat-enriched adipokine they call Adissp (Adipose-secreted signaling protein) that is a key regulator for white adipose tissue thermogenesis and glucose homeostasis.

The Diabetes Center of Excellence at UMass Chan Medical School received a $250,000 donation from the Arthur M. and Martha R. Pappas Foundation.  The funds were used to purchase and maintain a state-of-the-art flow cytometer to characterize cells and their functional and signaling properties.  It provides quantitative data on immune cell and pancreatic islet cell phenotypes to facilitate the analysis of samples and greatly expand our research team’s capacity to rapidly screen experimental samples. 
FULL STORY & VIDEO ABOUT DR. ARTHUR PAPPAS

Viral infections continue to be linked to the development of type 1 diabetes, yet human immune responses to viruses and how that leads to the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas is still unknown.  The laboratory of Jennifer Wang, MD, investigated inflammatory pathways because viruses can trigger inflammation that damages the pancreas.  The research focused on early events leading to autoimmune responses to viruses with the ultimate goal of therapeutics that could target inflammation before T1D manifests.

The 6th diabetic community health clinic was a multidisciplinary outreach event with providers from the UMass Memorial Diabetes Center of Excellence, vascular surgery, podiatry & more. They volunteered at the Athol Area YMCA to provide free exams and point of care testing. PHOTOS

The Joseph “Nuzzy” Nozzolillo Memorial Foundation raised $26K in 2023, adding to their ongoing support of the UMass Diabetes Center of Excellence.  Their six-year fundraising total has surpassed $111,000. The 6th annual Nuzzy Memorial Golf Tournament and 4th “Rockin’ for Nuzzy” fundraiser concert were organized by Joe's family and friends who are grateful for the care he received and optimistic about the diabetes research taking place at the UMass Chan DCOE.  PHOTOS & VIDEO

A five-year grant from the NIH/NIAMS was awarded to John Harris, MD, PhD, Founding Director of the Vitiligo Clinic & Research Center, and Autoimmune Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. The project is entitled Dissecting Functional Autoimmunity through High-Resolution Multiomics in a Vitiligo Center of Research Translation. Dr. Kent is leading Project 1, Autoreactive T Cell Function in Vitiligo.

The Czech lab examined the metabolic regulation of adipocytes by insulin receptor signaling and the cAMP signaling pathway in a review article published in the journal Trends in Cell Biology. The two major signaling networks regulate virtually every organ and/or cell type in the human body.  While the two signaling pathways intercommunicate regularly in fat cells, published data has shown they typically counteract one other in most cellular processes. Their opposite roles are indispensable for adipocyte physiology and metabolic homeostasis. Together they constitute what the Czech lab calls “the adipocyte supersystem.” However, their review highlights a set of genes that are known to promote metabolic health and were activated by both insulin and catecholamines in the same way.  

Sally Kent, PhD was awarded a Multi-Principal Investigator grant from the NIH/NIDDK entitled Extracellular Vesicle-mediated islet immune cross talk in type 1 diabetes pathogenesis. The project will examine the function of extracellular vesicles originating directly from pancreatic islets in people with  type 1 diabetes. The goal of these studies is to understand their functional role in the autoimmune process and to provide biomarkers for disease development.

Dr. O’Connor was co-recipient of the UMass Memorial Medical Group’s Prize for Academic Collaboration and Excellence (PACE) Award. It supports physicians in cutting-edge research and encourages interdepartmental collaboration. His project is studying the benefits of using widely available wearable devices such as smart watches, to protect people who are living with diabetes, from dangerous hypoglycemia. A pilot study of people with type 1 diabetes who are at risk for hypoglycemia will create an optimized algorithm for detecting hypoglycemia based on smart watch data.

The study aims to generate CAR T cell variants that would target and eliminate islet specific autoreactive T cells in people with type 1 diabetes. A grant from the NIH/NIDDK with Multi-Principal Investigators was awarded to investigate CAR T-cell technology as a potential T1D therapy. 

In a newly published study in the FASEB journal, the laboratories of Michael Brehm, PhD and Dale Greiner, PhD describe a novel humanized mouse model developed with improved Natural Killer (NK) cell acceptance and functionality.  Their data explains the potential for this in vivo model to study human NK cell biology and to test new human-specific immune-therapies that target NK cells.