Daniel J. Drucker, MD
Preventing kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. Time-restricted feeding and exercise. New weight loss approaches. Brown and white fat cells. Big data. Diabetes during pregnancy. These are just a few of the important basic science and clinical developments in diabetes over the past 12 months. Each of them will be discussed in one session at the 79th Scientific Sessions.
“It’s an absolutely fantastic time in science that we live in today,” said Daniel J. Drucker, MD, Professor of Medicine at the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at the University of Toronto. “We are changing the way we understand diabetes, and only for the better.”
Dr. Drucker will discuss significant clinical developments in the past year during the symposium Major Advances and Discoveries in Diabetes—The Year in Review, which will begin at 2:15 p.m. Monday in N-Hall E (North, Exhibition Level). He will share the stage with Juleen R. Zierath, PhD, who will highlight the most important basic science developments.
Juleen R. Zierath, PhD
“This is going to be a very high level session—a view from the mountain tops of some of the breakthroughs that have occurred clinically and in the basic science of diabetes,” said Dr. Zierath, Director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Professor of Integrative Physiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
“If you want to get caught up in a hurry, this is the session to attend,” she continued. “We will present what we know about a specific problem, what some people have solved in the area, and what’s on the horizon to come. And if you want to know more, we can alert you to the relevant research papers to take a deeper dive into the details.”
Among other topics, Dr. Zierath will discuss the latest findings on the obesity component of diabetes, how obesity drives diabetes, and the newest mechanisms to explain the development of obesity. On the clinical side, Dr. Drucker has “an embarrassment of riches to discuss.”
“We have tremendous insights into continuous glucose monitoring, pumps, and sensors in type 1 diabetes. And if you want to choose the most appropriate drug for type 2 diabetes at a particular point in the journey, we have new insight there, as well,” said Dr. Drucker, noting that it will be difficult to limit his presentation to the allotted hour.
“If I only mention 12 or 15 groundbreaking changes, my colleagues will saying, ‘I can’t believe he left out X, Y, and Z, which have fundamentally changed what we do in diabetes,’” Dr. Drucker said. “Not only are we transforming the ways we treat diabetes, we are transforming the way we deal with complications. For years, we shrugged our shoulders and hoped that if we treated the glucose, good things would happen. Now we are seeing amazing developments in therapies that also reduce complications.”
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