Editorial
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Diabetes. Nov 25, 2015; 6(16): 1309-1311
Published online Nov 25, 2015. doi: 10.4239/wjd.v6.i16.1309
From non-obese diabetic to Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donor with Diabetes: New heights in type 1 diabetes research
Lourdes Ramirez, Abdel Rahim A Hamad
Lourdes Ramirez, Abdel Rahim A Hamad, Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, United States
Author contributions: Ramirez L contributed to the writing and revising of the article; Hamad ARA conceived, designed and wrote the article.
Supported by The United States National Institutes of Health, No. 1R01AI099027 and 5R01DK104662 (to Hamad ARA).
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflict of interests.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Abdel Rahim A Hamad, BVSC, PhD, Associate Professor of Pathology and Medicine, Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 720 Rutland Ave, Ross 664G, Baltimore, MD 21205, United States. ahamad@jhmi.edu
Telephone: +1-410-6143021 Fax: +1-410-6143548
Received: July 8, 2015
Peer-review started: July 13, 2015
First decision: August 19, 2015
Revised: September 3, 2015
Accepted: November 3, 2015
Article in press: November 4, 2015
Published online: November 25, 2015
Processing time: 138 Days and 3.8 Hours
Abstract

Since the discovery of therapeutic insulin in 1922 and the development of the non-obese diabetic spontaneous mouse model in 1980, the establishment of Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donor with Diabetes (nPOD) in 2007 is arguably the most important milestone step in advancing type 1 diabetes (T1D) research. In this perspective, we briefly describe how nPOD is transforming T1D research via procuring and coordinating analysis of disease pathogenesis directly in human organs donated by deceased diabetic and control subjects. The successful precedent set up by nPOD is likely to spread far beyond the confines of research in T1D to revolutionize biomedical research of other disease using high quality procured human cells and tissues.

Keywords: Type 1 diabetes; Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donor with Diabetes; Non-obese diabetic mouse; Transitional type 1 diabetes research

Core tip: Type 1 diabetes (T1D) strikes early in life with monumental impact on life style and long term health of affected children. There is currently no cure for T1D or mechanisms to protect at risk individuals. A major obstacle is the difficulty in translating the interventions that succeeded in preventing or reversing the disease in the non-obese diabetic mouse model into human immunotherapies. Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donor with Diabetes has been established in 2007 to study the disease directly in humans by procuring and offering well preserved tissues to investigators. These efforts, as indicated by published results, are paying off by providing critical new insights that are expected to facilitate development of efficacious immunotherapies.