The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) has awarded Penn Medicine a $12 million, four-year grant to establish the Human Pancreas Analysis Program (HPAP).  

“The past decades have seen a dramatic improvement in our ability to profile human tissues relevant to Type 1 diabetes at the genomic, epigenomic, protein and functional levels,” said Klaus H. Kaestner, the Thomas and Evelyn Suor Butterworth Professor in Genetics and associate director of the Penn Diabetes Research Center, in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

HPAP is focused on procuring and phenotyping pancreatic tissues from individuals with or at risk for Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes or other types of pancreatic islet dysfunction characterized by changes in beta cell mass. The team will also promote additional analysis of samples, including sharing of biobanked HPAP tissues and the resulting multi-dimensional data with the diabetes research community through an open-access database.

The program, directed by Ali Naji, a professor of surgery, in Penn’s School of Medicine, consists of six teams at Penn with expertise in:

• Pancreas procurement and islet isolation, led by Dr. Naji

• Physiological phenotyping of pancreatic islets, led by Doris Stoffers, the Sylvan H. Eisman Professor of Medicine

• Immunology and epigenetics, particularly involving T and B cells, led by Michael R. Betts, an associate professor of microbiology

• Molecular profiling of islets, led by Dr. Kaestner

• Tissue analytics and biobanking, led by Michael Feldman, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine

• Bioinformatics, led by Jason H. Moore, the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics and director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics

The Program is also collaborating with teams at University of Florida, led by Mark A. Atkinson, and Vanderbilt University, led by Alvin C. Powers, who are funded by a separate award. HPAP, the newest program in the NIDDK-funded Human Islet Research Network, will build upon well-established collaborations among Penn investigators.

An unparalleled multidisciplinary approach, such as the mapping of the “immune atlas” of the pancreas and cutting-edge technology, such as single cell analysis by mass cytometry, are some of the program’s strengths. This and other technological platforms will allow researchers to study diabetes and pancreatic islets with unprecedented resolution, said the investigators.