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$10.2 million to target type 1 diabetes

December 15th, 2011

SVI’s Professor Tom Kay and A/Prof Helen Thomas – together with colleagues from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Sydney’s Westmead Millenium Institute and the Western Australian Institute of Medical Research – have today been awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council Program (NHMRC) Grant of $10.2 million to help them reach their goal of stopping type 1 diabetes.

Around 140,000 Australians live with type 1 diabetes. People with the disease lack the means to make insulin, because the cells responsible for making it are mistakenly attacked and destroyed by their own immune system. People with type 1 diabetes are therefore dependent on insulin injections to regulate their blood sugar levels.

Professor Tom Kay, Head of the Institute’s Immunology and Diabetes Unit and the grant’s Chief Investigator, said that there have been major advances in understanding type 1 diabetes but that translating these advances into routine care remains a challenge.

“The Program Grant aims to change the way that type 1 diabetes is treated by targeting the underlying mechanisms of the disease. Our team will focus on a range of areas – from developing safer and more effective immune therapies for the disease, to islet transplantation, looking for better markers of disease, and identifying ways to preserve the cells that are destroyed in type 1 diabetes.”

“Type 1 diabetes is a complex disease: this Grant gives us the chance to collaboratively approach it from a range of angles and with the best skills available. Our team includes six lead scientists from four institutions across Australia: some of us have worked together over decades, and such a breadth and diversity of experience, along with this support from the NHMRC, gives us the best chance of combating the disease.”

The NHMRC’s Program Grants scheme provides support over a period of 5 years for teams of high calibre researchers to pursue broadly based collaborative research activities.