
City of Hope's New Approach Aims to Cure Type 1 Diabetes in Six Years
CITY OF HOPE SETS NEW GOAL FOR TYPE 1 DIABETES CURE
More than $50 million in private funding aims to cure Type 1 diabetes in six years
A recent grouping of donations totaling $50 million is outstanding, those in the trenches with diabetes said. But only six years to a cure? Really? You lost us there, some claimed.
Dr. Bart Roep, Ph.D., director of the program, now known as the Wanek Family Project at City of Hope, understands that view.
Some people give up [on hope for a cure], and I respect that, he said. He admits, too, that six years is a goal, not a promise. I cannot be confident in the six years, he said. If I knew what was needed to do that, Id do it on one year. But, he feels the pathway City of Hope has laid out thanks to the donations leads the diabetes world on a road to better outcomes, and a place that, in six years, will be significantly better than where we are today.
What the program plans to do is change the entire way we view a cure, shifting from a one-size-fits-all method of research and goals to a system of precision medicine; a way to offer individualized and personalized therapies for people with diabetes much in the same way cancer treatment does today.
The program will draw heavily from a biorepository, something Dr. Roep says will save millions of dollars and many years in helping them embrace the concept of diabetes being unique in almost every individual. Armed with that knowledge they will dig back into human clinical studies that may not have succeeded on a mass scale and look to see if they can help patients on a smaller scale.
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