4 January DRC Director's Report - January 2023 January 4, 2023 By The Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center 0 The Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center held its 8th annual retreat on December 3, 2022, at the Terry Trueblood Recreation Center. DRC faculty and senior trainees came together for a day of research and celebration of the Center’s continued success. The day began with opening remarks by Co-Directors’ Kamal Rahmouni, PhD and Andrew Norris, MD, PhD followed by updates from the Metabolic Phenotyping Core and the Metabolomics Core Facility. We also heard from two new DRC faculty members, Bing Li, PhD, and Marcelo Correia, MD. This year we listened to presentations reporting annual progress from last year’s Pilot and Feasibility Grant Recipients, Katie Larson Ode, MD, Jon Resch, PhD, Ling Yang, PhD and Erin Talbert, PhD. Our keynote speaker was Lori Sussel, PhD from the Anschutz School of Medicine at the University of Colorado’s Barbara Davis Diabetes Center for Diabetes, who gave a talk titled “Pancreatic Islet Function: The Splice of Life”. Dr. Sussel discussed her most recent work regarding the genetic mechanisms that controls the development and function of the pancreas. For this year’s retreat, we invited the Center for Gene Therapy to join us as many members of this Center are involved in diabetes research. Thus, following the lunch session, the Center for Gene Therapy gave three different presentations. John Engelhardt, PhD, and Amy Ryan, PhD gave talks discussing cystic fibrosis and its relation to diabetes. During the last oral presentation session, we heard updates from first-year T32 Diabetes Research training Program trainees on their most current research. Other trainees presented their work in a poster format during the lunch session. Our celebration of yet another successful year for the Diabetes Research Center culminated in the announcement of the trainee prizes bestowed on Paul Williams, PhD and Guorui Deng, PhD. Related Articles DRC Director's Report - May 2023 The Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center held its Annual Diabetes Research Day on Monday, April 17th. With a strong emphasis on collaboration and sharing of knowledge, this event brought together about 65 researchers, clinicians, and students to advance the understanding of diabetes and improve patient outcomes. Diabetes Research Day featured a lineup of activities including short talks, a keynote address, T32 presentations and a poster session DRC Director's Report - July 2023 Dr. Julien Sebag is leading one of the research projects funded through the Bridge to Cure program. This month, his project has reached a major milestone, having been published in a prestigious journal. In this publication Dr. Sebag recognized the support provided by the FOE through the Bridge to the Cure program. DRC Director's Report - January 2021 A recent study by a team of UI researchers led by E. Dale Abel, MD, PhD, Director, FOEDRC discovered eating a ketogenic diet rescued mice from heart failure. The study, published in the November issue of the journal Nature Metabolism, was one of three companion papers from independent research teams that all point to the damaging effects of excess sugar (glucose) and its breakdown products on the heart. The UI study also revealed the potential to mitigate that damage by supplying the heart with alternate fuel sources in the form of high-fat diets. Given its need for a constant, reliable supply of energy, the heart is very flexible about the type of molecules it can burn for fuel. Most of the heart’s energy comes from metabolizing fatty acids, but heart cells can also burn glucose and lactate, and also ketones. DRC Director's Report - August 2023 The FOEDRC maintains two Core Research Facilities. FOEDRC scientists rely heavily on these two Core Research Facilities. These Cores are centralized laboratories that allow researchers to perform experiments needing specialized technologies in a time- and cost-efficient way. This month we focus our report on the world-class FOEDRC Metabolomics Core Facility. DRC Director's Report - September 2023 Health and Human Physiology assistant professor Anna Stanhewicz has just been awarded a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health totaling $3.035 million to put towards her research. Her focus lies in gestational diabetes and the long-term impact it has on those who have had it. Women who develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy are two times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 7 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes in the decade after pregnancy, but the reason why this occurs is unclear and there are currently no specific treatment strategies to prevent this disease progression. DRC Director's Report -October 2023 Congratulations to the 2023-2024 FOEDRC Pilot & Feasibility Grant Recipients! The Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center is pleased to announce the results of its thirteenth round of Pilot and Feasibility Grants. These grant awards fund innovative pilot projects by early career investigators who are entering the diabetes research field, or established investigators with innovative ideas that focus on a new direction in diabetes research. The goal of the program is to generate data that will enable awardees to compete for peer-reviewed national funding for diabetes related projects that show exceptional promise. Over a dozen researchers from across the University of Iowa campus submitted meritorious proposals that underwent a comprehensive and competitive peer-review process. Two applicants were selected to receive a catalyst award grant of $50,000 to support their research proposal, with the possibility for a second year of funding, for a total of $100,000 over a two-year period. Two applicants were selected to receive one-year seed grant awards of $5,000 each to support discreet research proposals to obtain data needed to generate essential preliminary data in a diabetes-related project to increase competitive for subsequent extramural funding. Showing 0 Comment Comments are closed.