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- Home : SVI Resources : Type 1 diabetes clinical trial : Meet the team
Meet the team
The BANDIT (Baricitinib in new onset type 1 diabetes) trial is being undertaken by some of Australia’s most experienced type 1 diabetes researchers and clinicians.
Professor Tom Kay
Professor Tom Kay is the Director of SVI and an endocrinologist at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne. Professor Kay is the Director of the Tom Mandel Islet Transplant Program, which carried out Victoria’s first successful islet transplant. Tom is the immediate Past President of The Immunology of Diabetes Society (IDS) and Secretary of the International Pancreas and Islet Transplant Association (IPITA).
Professor Helen Thomas
Professor Helen Thomas is Head of the Immunology and Diabetes Unit at SVI, Australia’s largest type 1 diabetes research group. Her research aims to protect the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas from being destroyed by immune cells.
Associate Professor John Wentworth
Associate Professor John Wentworth has worked as an endocrinologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and as a researcher at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute since 2006. He was appointed as a Director of the Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet collaborative in 2010 and in 2019 helped establish a local screening service for type 1 diabetes called Type1Screen. In these roles he has implemented 6 clinical studies of immune therapy for type 1 diabetes in Australia and New Zealand.
Professor Fergus Cameron
Professor Fergus Cameron is a Group Leader at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and Director of the Department of Endocrinology and Diabetes at The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne. He has published widely in medical and lay literature about endocrine and diabetes management. Professor Cameron is Past President of the Australasian Paediatric Endocrine Group and is a participant in the Hvidoere Study Group on Childhood Diabetes. He is a past council member of the International Society for Paediatric and Adolescent Diabetes.
Professor Jennifer Couper
Professor Couper heads the diabetes and endocrinology department at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Adelaide, caring for 700 children with type 1 diabetes, and the Discipline of Paediatrics, University of Adelaide. Her research focuses on the prevention of type 1 diabetes and its complications in children and adolescents. She leads the national cohort of the Environmental determinants of diabetes in children (ENDIA), and is on the Advisory Council of the International Society of Pediatric and Adolescent Diabetes.
Dr Balasubramanian Krishnamurthy
Dr Bala Krishnamurthy is a Senior Research Fellow at SVI and an endocrinologist at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, Sunshine Hospital and Werribee Mercy Hospital. His research is focused on developing antigen-specific therapies to prevent type 1 diabetes.
Professor Richard MacIsaac
Professor Richard MacIsaac is the Director of Endocrinology & Diabetes at St Vincent’s Health. His main research interest is diabetes and its complications, especially those related to cardiovascular and kidney disease.
Professor Peter Colman
Professor Peter Colman is an endocrinologist at Royal Melbourne Hospital and also runs a number of clinical studies involving prediction and prevention of type 1 diabetes, new treatments for type 1 and type 2 diabetes and complications of diabetes.
Dr Michaela Waibel
Dr Michaela Waibel is an experienced researcher and project manager and has been at SVI since 2014. In her role at SVI she has managed and coordinated pre-clinical and clinical research projects for the islet transplant program and the CRC for cell therapy manufacturing.