Recent key advancements in diabetes research

Interviewer: With us today is Dr. Peter Arvan, professor of Internal Medicine and Diabetes Research at the University of Michigan, who is joining us to discuss recent developments in diabetes research, and specifically research into the role of pancreatic β cells in diabetes. Dr. Arvan, thank you very much for joining us today. Prof. Arvan: Thank you. Interviewer: Looking back at the past year or so, can you share with us what you consider to be the most interesting areas in pancreatic β cell biology in which recent advancements have helped to shed light on the causes of diabetes. Prof. Arvan: Yeah! Just to get started, let me just say that diabetes is divided into a couple of general subtypes, probably more than 90% of human diabetes, we call type 2 diabetes. I will come back to it in a moment. Another 6% or 7%, we describe as type 1 diabetes, and maybe the final 3%, we describe as monogenic diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, by far the most common form, is the one that's associated with overweight and obesity, not in everyone with type 2 diabetes, but in most. Tends to involve what we call relative insulin deficiency, insulin gets made but it is insufficient to control blood glucose because the body is somewhat resistant to the action of the insulin hormone. In the past year, yes, there's progress in multiple areas. I'll just touch quickly on a bunch of these. Particularly in the genetics area, there have been great advances in identifying gene variants—what we call genome-wide association studies that link variants to various metabolic phenotypes that