Diabetes represents a worldwide health crisis, with the incidence of both type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) steadily increasing. While autoimmunity is central to T1D, many key aspects of the disease process are shared by T1D and T2D, including beta cell dysfunction, hyperglycemia, metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance. Complications of T1D and T2D also have many similarities, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetic kidney disease (DKD), both leading causes of morbidity and mortality. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center (UC AMC) is among world leaders in clinical translational investigations into T1D and T2D across the lifespan, as well as in gestational diabetes (GDM) and cystic fibrosis-related diabetes (CFRD). Funding through the Diabetes Research Center (DRC) would capitalize on these existing strengths and catalyze the formation of an integrated comprehensive diabetes research program. The Clinical Resource Core (CR) of the UC Denver DRC stands at the interface of multiple institutions, programs and individuals, all of whom are working to prevent or ameliorate the devastating long term complications of diabetes and its high economic burden. The CR core would leverage the current clinical research facilities and equipment available at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes (BDC), UC AMC?s Clinical Translational Research Center (CTRC), The University of Colorado Hospital, Denver Veteran?s Administration Medical Center (VA) and Children?s Hospital Colorado. The DRC CR core would integrate diabetes research across these institutions through communication and distribution of the resources available, and create shared sample and data biobanks and a recruiting database of mothers, infants, children, adolescents and adults with diabetes, diabetes risk and controls. Such integration would accelerate progress and increase the quality of diabetes research, coalesce existing strengths and strategically focus faculty recruitment in areas of needed growth. DRC funding would also attract new talent at postgraduate and junior faculty levels and add unique components of infrastructure needed for discovery. Specifically, we will improve access and collaborations for recruiting subjects, tracking data and banking tissue samples from well-phenotyped participants with diabetes and control subjects across the lifespan; establish collections of samples from our well-characterized subjects and facilitate the ability of DRC users to perform assays from peripheral blood, serum and plasma utilizing state of the art techniques; improve provision of specialized diagnostic and analytic services.
