Esra Karakose, PhD
Assistant Professor
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Featured in the Session: Expanding the Beta-Cell Pool: What’s New with Proliferation, Neogenesis, and Transdifferentiation
When
Sunday, June 7
at 1:30 p.m.
Where
355 (Level 3)
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
What is your presentation about?
All forms of diabetes result from insufficient numbers of functional beta cells. The overall goal of my group is to find druggable targets for beta cell regeneration and to better understand the mechanism(s) of action of beta cell regenerative drugs. My presentation will focus on transdifferentiation, alpha-to-beta cell conversion in particular, as a means to regenerate human beta cells and how it may underlie the mechanism through which beta cell regenerative drugs work.
How do you hope your presentation will impact diabetes research or care?
By providing a better understanding of the mechanism of action of the existing beta cell regenerative drugs, we can tailor more efficient therapies and discover novel pathways/molecules to target for beta cell regeneration. Considering that all patients with diabetes have ample amounts of alpha cells, converting a fraction of alpha cells to beta cells would be a game changer in the treatment of diabetes.
How did you become involved with this area of diabetes research or care?
Our group has a long-standing interest in studying beta cell regeneration with the goal of discovering novel beta cell regenerative therapies for diabetes. I am particularly interested in how transdifferentiation could be a novel mechanism to increase the amount of functional beta cells in pancreatic human islets.