An Innovative approach towards understanding and arresting Type 1 diabetes

Research summary

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a chronic disease affecting around 17 million people worldwide. The disease may present at any age, but most typically develops in early life with a peak around puberty. The scientific insights to the triggering events, disease susceptibility, and subsequent pathophysiological events leading to a failing beta-cell function and beta cell loss (beta cells are found in the pancreas produce insulin)in human T1D are quite limited and disease modifying therapeutic approaches to address T1D are not available today. The INNODIA consortium comprises of 33 partners including 26 academic institutes and clinics, 4 European national pharmaceutical industry associations (EFPIA), 2 patient organizations and one medium sized enterprise (SME) and was launched in response to the first call of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2)on 19 January 2016. INNODIA aims to advance in a decisive way how to predict, stage, evaluate and prevent the onset and progression of T1D. This will be achieved by developing a European infrastructure for the recruitment, detailed clinical phenotyping and biosampling (including blood, stool and urine sampling)of a large cohort of newly diagnosed (ND) patients with T1D and unaffected family members (UFM)generating an unrivalled bioresource for T1D discovery science. Workpackage 1 is one of 6 workpackages and is responsible for the recruitment of participants with T1D and their UFM (first degree relatives). UFMs will be tested for diabetes autoantibodies at their screening visit and those that are positive will be followed up for 4 years(7 visits). UFMs that are negative to autoantibodies will be sent a health questionnaire every year until the end of the study (4 years)and maybe recalled for further sampling. ND participants will be invited to join the study within 6 weeks of diagnosis and then attend study visits at 3, 6, 12 and 24 months from diagnosis.

Principal Investigator

Dr Rachel Besser

Contact us

Email: diabetes.research1@ouh.nhs.uk

IRAS number

210497