Howard Hughes Investigator Expert In Magnetic Resonance Receives Columbia's Naomi Berrie Award
Major Diabetes Honor Recognizes Ground-Breaking Work on Insulin Resistance in Humans; Fellow Award Goes to Junior Investigator at Columbia
NEW YORK – Columbia University Medical Center will present the 2007 Naomi Berrie Awards this Saturday to a nationally recognized diabetes physician/scientist and a promising young investigator for their outstanding achievements in diabetes research.
The Award for Outstanding Achievement in Diabetes Research goes to Gerald I. Shulman, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.P., for his advances in studying cellular metabolism related to diabetes in animals and humans. The second award will support Teresa Mastracci, Ph.D., whose research in the laboratory of Dr. Lori Sussel focuses on the development of insulin-producing beta cells.
The awards ceremony will take place at the 9th annual Frontiers in Diabetes Research Conference on “Molecular Genetics of Diabetes and Obesity,” this Saturday, November 3, 2007 from 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. in the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion, 1150 St. Nicholas Ave.
Established by the Russell Berrie Foundation in 2000, the Naomi Berrie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Diabetes Research was designed to promote and reward outstanding achievement in the field, while simultaneously helping to promote important scientific collaborations across institutions and furthering the careers of especially promising young diabetes investigators. Each year, the recipient – a senior scientist who has made major contributions to diabetes research – is given $100,000 to support a two-year research fellowship for a student or research fellow in his or her laboratory. The second $100,000 award supports a research fellow at Columbia.
Dr. Shulman Recognized for Advancing Understanding of Liver, Muscles, Metabolism
Dr. Shulman is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor of internal medicine and cellular & molecular physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. He will be honored for his work in pioneering the use of magnetic resonance spectroscopy to directly examine intracellular metabolism of sugars and fats in humans.
“The Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center is at the forefront of diabetes research and treatment, and it’s an honor to have my research recognized and supported with this award,” Dr. Shulman said. “A major aim of my work is to use these techniques to provide insights into metabolism that can lead to better treatments and prevention of type 2 diabetes.”
The nation’s fifth leading killer, diabetes is a disease in which the body’s failure to regulate glucose, or blood sugar, can lead to fatal complications. As patients with diabetes know all too well, modern diabetes management requires intensive self-monitoring of blood glucose levels. Dr. Shulman’s work has led to fundamental insights into the basic biology of type 2 diabetes by developing novel magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) methods to non-invasively assess metabolism in liver and muscle.
“Shulman’s work has led to major revisions and refinements in our understanding of the cellular and molecular bases for how glucose and fat metabolism in the liver and muscle responds to insulin,” Dr. Rudolph Leibel said. “Resistance to insulin’s actions in the liver and muscle are major contributors to the metabolic disorders that characterize type 2 diabetes.”
Using MRS, Dr. Shulman’s group discovered a new mechanism for fat-induced insulin resistance in muscle, which has led to the identification of several novel therapeutic targets for treating diabetes.
His research has confirmed that increased gluconeogenesis in the liver – the generation of glucose from non-sugar precursors – is primarily responsible for increased blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. He also has developed an MRS technique to directly quantify rates of muscle glycogen (a stored form of glucose) synthesis in normal and diabetic humans. His results suggest that decreased insulin-stimulated muscle glycogen synthesis is the major factor responsible for insulin resistance.
Dr. Shulman also has received the Novartis Award in Diabetes (1999) and the Josiah Brown Award in Diabetes from University of California, Los Angeles (2000). In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Naomi Berrie Fellow in Diabetes Research Awardee Focuses on Beta Cell Development
The young investigator award will go to Teresa Mastracci, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, whose research in the lab of Lori Sussel, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics and development at Columbia, and a member of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, has focused on understanding how the populations of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas are differentiated from progenitor or stem cell populations. The research is based on the idea that the identification of the molecules required to make islet cells during normal fetal development will provide important insights for the generation of alternative sources of insulin-producing cells to treat diabetic patients.
Dr. Mastracci recently joined Dr. Sussel in examining the early development of hormone-producing cells of the pancreas at a molecular level. Dr. Mastracci is a trained molecular biologist, with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and genetics from the University of Guelph (Canada). She held a Fellowship of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which allowed her to begin her pursuit of bench research. Subsequently, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, studying the genetics of cancer at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. Dr. Sussel earned her doctorate from Columbia University in microbiology and did her post-doctoral work in molecular & developmental biology and genetics at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. In 2006, she received the Mary Jane Kugel Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. In 2007 she moved her laboratory to Columbia University from the University of Colorado.
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Past recipients of the Naomi Berrie award include Graeme Bell, Ph.D., University of Chicago (2000); C. Ronald Kahn, M.D., Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School, (2001); Clifton Bogardus III, M.D., National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (2002); George S. Eisenbarth, M.D., Ph.D., the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (2003); Douglas Melton, Ph.D. of Harvard University (2004), Michael Brownlee of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2005); and Michael Schwartz, M.D., University of Washington (2006).
The one-day Frontiers in Diabetes symposium is designed for scientist/investigators, students and clinicians with interests in diabetes and/or obesity. This year's meeting is focused on recent advances in understanding the molecular genetics of diabetes and obesity, their interrelationships and complications. All interested individuals at Columbia are encouraged to attend. Pre-registration is advised http://ColumbiaCME.org
Upon its official opening in October 1998, the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center established a new standard of care for the 1.6 million people with diabetes in the New York area—combining world-class diabetes research and education programs with unprecedented family-oriented patient care. Named for the mother of the late Russell Berrie, founder of RUSS™ Toys, the center is today recognized as the most comprehensive diabetes research and treatment center in the tri-state region, and has been designated as a national “Diabetes Center of Excellence” – one of only three in the state of New York. For more information, visit www.nbdiabetes.org.
Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in pre-clinical and clinical research, in medical and health sciences education, and in patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, nurses, and dentists at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, the College of Dental Medicine, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. www.cumc.columbia.edu