FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 1, 2004
contact:
Rich Murphy, PNRI
(206) 726-1200
rmurphy@pnri.org
Seattle-The diabetes research being conducted at Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) under the direction of Dr. William Hagopian was featured in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. In a front-page article, “Researchers’ Goal: Stopping Diabetes Before Kids Get It,” Journal reporter Michael Waldholz described the approaches Hagopian and his colleagues are taking to predict and prevent type 1 diabetes. According to the article, “A small group of physicians around the world [are undertaking] screening studies that are part of a path-breaking international effort to predict and prevent type 1 diabetes.” Hagopian is one of them.
The Journal article describes the experience of one of the families Hagopian is working with. Kim and Scott Pepin have three children. Their youngest child, Drew, is 6 years old. A year and a half ago he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Now, the Pepins have given Hagopian permission to test their other two children, Drew’s sisters, for genetic factors that indicate an elevated risk of developing type 1 diabetes.
This family is part of a large-population screening study the Hagopian lab is conducting at PNRI, funded by the Centers for Disease Control. Hagopian and his colleagues are testing the blood of almost 32,000 Washington youngsters in order to identify those who are more likely than others to develop diabetes.
“Though most people don’t know this,” Hagopian says in the Journal article, “we can now predict, with pretty high accuracy, which children develop type 1 diabetes.” The implication for researchers, according to Hagopian, is that they “feel an obligation to figure out how to capitalize on this predictive power.”
One approach he has taken has been to develop more efficient and less costly procedures for gathering and analyzing the critical information needed for prediction. His lab, for example, has devised ways to test blood samples for three key antibodies at the same time. Further, he and his staff have collaborated with the State of Washington to make use of the dried blood spots collected from infants at birth. With the permission of parents, Hagopian can use this dried blood to test for genetic risk without having to draw new blood from the child.
Hagopian is also working to understand the environmental factors that trigger type 1 diabetes among those who have an elevated genetic risk. By this means, and by collaborating on studies designed to postpone and ultimately prevent the destruction of the body’s insulin-producing cells, Hagopian is putting his prediction research to work.
Journal writer Waldholz describes the nightly experience of Drew Pepin’s mother Kim. She is up, checking her son’s blood sugar and, when necessary, giving him insulin injections. She doesn’t sleep through the night, nor, she says, do other mothers of children with diabetes. It is for her and Drew, and for Drew’s sisters–for the almost 1 million children with juvenile diabetes–that Hagopian is working to understand the onset of this disease. If it can be predicted, it can be better understood. And if it can be understood, Hagopian believes, it can eventually be prevented.
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