Don’t miss the premiere of Taking Control of Your Diabetes: Diabetes Prevention, the first in the totally revamped TCOYD series, on Thursday, June 24th at 8:00pm. Nearly 24 million Americans have diabetes and the numbers are increasing at alarming rates. What can we do, if anything, to prevent diabetes in the first place? Join host Dr. Steven Edelman as he talks to leading experts Dr. Matthias von Herrath and Dr. Robert Henry to learn the latest about the prevention of type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Matthias von Herrath, MD
Dr. von Herrath serves as Director of the Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research, in addition to being a full Member in the Division of Developmental Immunology. Dr. von Herrath’s research focuses on strategies to prevent type 1 diabetes through the induction of regulatory T cells.
Dr. von Herrath wrote his thesis in the field of Biochemistry and then received his M.D. in Medicine from the Freiburg Medical School in Freiburg, Germany in 1988. He did his residency work at the Freiburg Medical Center in the Internal Medicine/Immunology department and at the Diakonic Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit in Freiburg. For his postdoctoral work, Dr. von Herrath went to The Scripps Research Institute and worked in its Neuropharmacology and Immunology departments.
Dr. von Herrath is an editor and reviewer for numerous publications as well as being a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and a Council Member for the International Diabetes Society. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of the 2006 Grotzky Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International and the 2007-2012 Scholar Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
Dr. von Herrath and his team study why the immune system sometimes attacks the body’s own cells. They focus on type 1 diabetes, a disease caused by the immune system attacking the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, and on diseases caused by viral infections. Their goal is to develop and evaluate new treatments and therapies for these conditions, in particular immune-based interventions.
Robert R. Henry, MD
Dr. Robert R. Henry is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of California, San Diego. Recent honors include the American Diabetes Association Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award and the Robert H. Williams-Rachmiel Levine Award from the Western Metabolism Club. His primary research interests involve studies in the etiology, treatment, and prevention of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Studies are directed almost exclusively at the role of skeletal muscle in these disorders and are designed to elucidate what aspects of muscle metabolism are primary and which are secondary in etiology. These investigations involve studies of intact humans, combining glucose clamps with indirect calorimetry, leg blood flow and substrate balance, and needle biopsies of vastus lateralis muscle. Complementary in vitro studies are performed on human muscle cultures from such patients and involve studies of insulin signal transduction, gene regulation, enzymatic activation, and mitogenesis.
