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Catalyzing Innovative Research is Mantra for BCM Diabetes Centerby Dipali Pathak 
Dr. Lawrence C.B. Chan is director of the federally designated Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. Mice and cheese are a natural combination. Mice and pepper, however, have an unexpected benefit. If a mouse is prone to diabetes, the 'hot' ingredient in peppers might provide protection against that devastating disease. This unexpected relationship prompted Dr. Ellen Lumpkin, an expert in the field of touch as well as an assistant professor of neuroscience and of molecular physiology and biophysics at Baylor College of Medicine, to venture into diabetes research, something she might never have considered without the support of BCM's federally designated Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the BCM Center director, Dr. Lawrence Chan, hoped to encourage that kind of innovation when the Center received its federal designation in January 2008. "As the only Center in the state and the southwest region, we are a hub of information and coordination for other researchers as well as the public," said Chan, also professor of medicine - endocrinology and professor of molecular and cellular biology at BCM. "We also collaborate with the other 16 centers in the country." The Center is home to biomedical research core laboratories that provide services to researchers as well and funds pilot and feasibility projects that will advance the understanding and treatment of diabetes. The Center supports three types of researchers:
This opportunity piqued Lumpkin's interest. She is also an assistant professor of molecular and human genetics at BCM. She focuses her work on understanding how the sensory nervous system allows people to sense touch and pain. Sensory neurons that innervate the skin respond to painful touch, chemicals and temperatures. Substances found in nature, such as the spice in chili peppers, activate specific hot pepper, or capsaicin, receptors on these sensory neurons and cause people to feel pain. Other sensory receptors respond to another "hot" substance—wasabi. The sensory neurons that are found in the skin are also present in internal organs such as the pancreas. Many of these sensory neurons produce the capsaicin receptors. Lumpkin and third-year neuroscience graduate student Kara Marshall were intrigued by the fact that injecting capsaicin into baby mice who had a predisposition to diabetes not only killed the sensory neurons that respond to pain, but also eliminated the animals' risk of getting diabetes. Obviously, these sensory neurons had some role in metabolism, but exploring that role further required research funding. They wrote a successful proposal that enabled the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center to fund their work. "Metabolic studies in mice are extremely expensive, and so we weren't going to be able to take our studies far without funding," said Lumpkin. "We now have access to this funding so we can test whether specific sensory receptors are active in the neurons that innervate the pancreas and whether these receptors play a role in blood glucose regulation." "We're not experts in the field of endocrinology, and bringing a different expertise to the table is exciting but very difficult to get funded without data to support our hypothesis. The federal grant (establishing the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center) allows us to have a time span to collect data and prove that we can go about solving the problem in a different way," said Marshall. The core laboratories are only one area in which diabetes research is conducted at BCM. Dr. Ashok Balasubramanyam, professor of medicine-endocrinology at BCM, helps translate research conducted in the laboratories into treatment for people who suffer from diabetes. "Through support from the National Institutes of Health, we hope to expand the program and move forward with more core laboratories." "For years, diabetes was classified as either type 1 or type 2, but there's not really a clear distinction between the two anymore. It's important to get as many characteristics as possible and group people into narrow groups to study them," said Balasubramanyam. He is able to do this by studying the varied patient population at Ben Taub General Hospital, part of the tax-supported Harris County Hospital District. Balasubramanyam wanted to understand better why patients who are HIV positive develop a severe lipid or fat disorder that causes resistance to the positive effects of insulin. Again, a pilot project funded by the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center helped to catalyze the research. With Drs. R.V. Sekhar, Farook Jahoor and Dorothy Lewis, the team developed human metabolic studies, followed by cellular and mouse models, that helped them understand the health problems of these patients. Now they are helping to develop new treatments for these patients and testing them directly. "The intellectual collaboration within the Center is important for this type of research to happen," said Balasubramanyam. In studying patients who presented with diabetic ketoacidosis, previously considered a severe form of type 1 diabetes, Balasubramanyam and his team determined that some of these patients did not have type 1 diabetes at all and some did not need lifelong insulin treatment. Tracking and studying these patients has led to the discovery of forms of diabetes characterized by failure of pancreatic beta cells due to novel mechanisms. For Chan, this type of research makes the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center a success. The collaboration of researchers from various fields encourages new kinds of research and understanding of the disease. "Through support from the National Institutes of Health, we hope to expand the program and move forward with more core laboratories. We plan additional coordination and interaction among our researchers and hope to recruit additional people to our team," said Chan. "Some of the research we now have going on here at Baylor would not have been possible without this designated center." Chan holds the Betty Rutherford Chair for Diabetes Research at BCM. 
Drs. Chan and Lumpkin look at the images of touch receptors with graduate student Marshall. |
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Volume 5, Issue 1, Winter 2009 |
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Each project is funded at $50,000 annually for as long as two years and gives the funded researchers access to the services provided in the various