MRC response to JDRF parliamentary event on type 1 diabetes
Wednesday 25 April 2012
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) will today hold a parliamentary event to raise the profile of type 1 diabetes (T1D). It will call on the Medical Research Council (MRC) to work closely with JDRF to promote type T1D in programmes focusing on mechanisms of other autoimmune diseases.
Responding to the calls, the MRC’s director of research programmes Dr Declan Mulkeen, said:
“Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are important health challenges that will benefit from investment in research aimed at effective prevention and treatments. MRC funding for T1D has already led to research successes that may contribute to the development of cell-based therapies and to advances in our understanding of the factors that determine the risk of T1D.The MRC always welcomes high quality applications in every area of medical science and these are judged in open competition with other demands on funding. Awards are made according to their potential for scientific advances and importance for health. We have enjoyed good collaborations with JDRF in the past and will continue to work closely with them to encourage proposals on T1D and to ensure the scientific opportunities in this area are fully exploited by the research community.”
The MRC is one of the main agencies through which the Government supports medical and clinical research. It funds a broad portfolio of diabetes research amounting to £21.8m in 2010/11. Of this, £3.9m (18 per cent) is relevant to T1D, and is a reflection of the research proposals submitted by academic scientists and the prevalence of T1D and T2D in the general population.
Research co-funded by the MRC has already delivered positive outcomes. For example, scientists at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith, identified an entire network of genes that contribute to a person’s risk of developing T1D. This work could pave the way for improved drug treatments for T1D and other inflammatory diseases.
Researchers at the MRC Cambridge Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine have made advances in understanding the mechanisms controlling the ‘primary germ layers’, the building block of the body’s organs, including the pancreas. A major aim of this research is to generate early (progenitor) pancreatic cells for cell-based therapies to treat T1D.
The MRC funds a broad portfolio of research on autoimmunity and autoimmune disease which amounted to £26.9m in 2010/11. Given the underlying immune mechanisms of some of these diseases may be overlapping, a large proportion of this underpinning work could advance the understanding and treatment of T1D.
