Theme lead: Jeremy Tomlinson
Jeremy Tomlinson’s work tries to understand the mechanisms, in particular the role of steroid hormones that drive metabolic disease, including obesity, insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. His work uses cell models as well as translational clinical studies to better understand the processes by which fat accumulates in the liver and to trial new and emerging treatments.
Theme Liaison: Sinead Wright
Contact: brc@ocdem.ox.ac.uk
Phone 01865 227441
Deputy Theme Lead: Amanda Adler
Amanda Adler is Professor of Diabetic Medicine and Health Policy. She is Director of the Diabetes Trials Unit. She emphasises research which identifies clinically and cost effective interventions and strategies to help people with diabetes.
Sub-Theme Co-Lead: Katharine Owen
Katharine Owen is currently Associate Professor of Diabetes. Her research is focused on obtaining an accurate diagnosis for different type of diabetes and ensuring that people are on the most appropriate and effective treatment. Katharine co-leads on local efforts to involve people in research, not just as participants, but also in the design and dissemination of clinical studies. She is also interested in the translation and implementation of research projects into clinical practice.
Sub-Theme Co-Lead: Peter Friend
Peter Friend is an academic transplant surgeon whose research is based on the large clinical programme of pancreatic transplantation at the Oxford Transplant Centre – 800 transplants since the service commenced in 2002. Translational research projects include: analysis of prognostic indicators; biomarkers and graft monitoring; donor organ preservation and optimisation; novel immunosuppression.
Sub-Theme Co-Lead: Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson is Professor of Paediatric Surgery, Clinical Lead for the Oxford Islet Transplant Programme, and Director of the DRWF Human Islet Isolation Facility. His research aims to develop strategies that enable islet transplantation to be translated to children. Specifically, his group aims to understand the molecular structure of the islet-exocrine interface of different donors to develop pancreatico-mimetic bio-scaffolds that can be used for islet immune-isolation.
Sub-Theme Co-Lead: Patrik Rorsman
Patrik Rorsman FRS is Professor of Diabetic Medicine and a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. Patrik is internationally recognised for his research which aims is to explain how changes in the plasma glucose concentration via islet cell electrical activity and increases in the cytoplasmic Ca2+-concentration regulate exocytotic release of insulin as well as glucagon and somatostatin.
Sub-Theme Co-Lead: Leanne Hodson
Leanne Hodson is Associate Professor of Diabetes and Metabolism and a British Heart Foundation Senior Fellow. Leanne’s research focuses on the liver and its pivotal role in fat metabolism as it integrates endogenous and exogenous fatty acids (FAs). Perturbations in liver FA metabolism have the potential to impact widely on metabolic health. Accumulation liver fat underlies the spectrum of conditions known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) which is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Key Researcher: Garry Tan
Garry Tan is a consultant in diabetes with an interest in how care for people with diabetes can be improved, ranging from care for people with diabetes in hospital to new treatments and how care is organised out of hospital.
Sub-Theme Lead: Rustam Rea
Dr Rea has been a diabetes consultant for over 10 years and has a particular interest in improving the organisation of care for people with Diabetes in the best way to achieve the best outcomes. This has involved linking patients, GPs and hospitals together to work collaboratively. He is interested in research to see how linking information between GPs and the hospital Diabetes services can improve care and how patients can more easily be involved in designing and participating in research studies.
Key Researcher: Alistair Lumb
Dr Lumb is interested in the management of Type 1 diabetes for sport and exercise, the use of technology to improve diabetes care, the use of guidelines to support optimal diabetes care in specific clinical situations (such as around pancreatic surgery), islet transplantation and the development of integrated diabetes care.
Key Researcher: Rury Holman
Rury Holman Professor of Diabetic Medicine and a NIHR Senior Investigator. He is the Director of the Diabetes Trials Unit (DTU) which designs, runs and analyses large-scale interventional clinical outcome trials nationally and internationally. The DTU also undertakes major modelling and statistical programmes to utilise fully the data available from its many studies with a particular emphasis on modelling diabetes and cardiovascular disease processes. TPTM
Key Researcher: John Todd
Professor Todd’s goal is to treat and prevent type 1 diabetes by preserving beta-cell mass and insulin secretion through an improved understanding of the genetic-aetiological pathways of disease. Professor of Precision Medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, directs the JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (DIL).
ndm.ox.ac.uk/principal-investigators/researcher/john-todd
Key Researcher: Rachel Besser
Rachel Besser is a consultant in paediatric diabetes and endocrinology, clinical lead for the paediatric diabetes service, and honorary senior clinical lecturer at the University of Oxford. She is interested in the natural history of type 1 diabetes, improving patient outcomes using new technologies and interventions to preserve of C-peptide.
Key Researcher: Fredrik Karpe
Professor Fredrik Karpe conducts research on the metabolic complications of obesity and established the Oxford Biobank which now has 8,000 healthy population based men and women aged 30-50 committed to recall studies. Such recall studies are coordinated via the Oxford NIHR Bioresource, which is heavily used for the translational metabolic and diabetes research within the theme.
ocdem.ox.ac.uk/grant-holders/researcher/fredrik-karpe
oxfordbiobank.org.uk
Rutger Ploeg
Key Researcher
Rutger Ploeg is Professor of Transplant Biology, Director of Clinical & Translational Research and Consultant Transplant Surgeon. He is BRC WG Transplantation Chair and coordinates 2 consortia: COPE and QUOD. He focuses on organ injury/repair in transplantation including perfusion, targeted intervention and collaborative pancreas/islet research.
Links:
COPE – cope-eu.org
QUOD – quod.org.uk
Key Researcher: Henk Giele
Dr Giele’s research investigates methods of improving pancreas and islet transplantation by the use of sentinel skin flaps derived from the same donor facilitating immunological monitoring and investigation. His research aims to improve the longevity and function of pancreas and islet transplantation, and reduce the immuno-suppressive burden and morbidity.
Contact: Henk.Giele@nds.ox.ac.uk or PA Natasa.Bestova@ouh.nhs.uk Phone 01865 227514
Key Researcher: Ed Sharples
Ed Sharples is a consultant in renal and transplant medicine. He co-supervises the pancreas transplant research group in the Oxford Transplant Centre. His research interests include metabolic function and predicting outcome of pancreas transplants, and cardiovascular disease in diabetes and renal failure (collaboration with Dr Ferreira, Oxford).
Contact: Edward.Sharples@ouh.nhs.uk Phone 01865 228688 (secretary)
Key Researcher: David Ray
David Ray is Professor of Endocrinology, and a Wellcome Investigator. David works on the regulation of energy metabolism, and diabetes risk by the body clock, and sleep.
Key Researcher: Costas Christodoulides
Costas Christodoulides’s work focuses on understanding how obesity leads to the development of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Specifically, his research aims to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating adipocyte number (adipose tissue ‘expandability’) and distribution within the body; two key determinants of susceptibility to obesity-associated cardiometabolic diseases. To achieve this, he uses a combination of human genetic and physiological approaches, coupled with functional studies in human fat depot-specific cellular models
Key Researcher: David Hodson
David is Robert Turner Professor of Diabetic Medicine. His research is focused on cellular metabolism, in particular understanding how common anti-diabetes and anti-obesity drugs function in the pancreas and brain. To do this, the lab applies cutting-edge imaging technology to samples from patients with type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes as well as obesity and related diseases (e.g. non-alcoholic fatty liver disease).
Research Facilitator: Jane Itzhaki
Jane Itzhaki is responsible for supporting the Oxford University-wide initiative Oxford Metabolic Health (OMH) by co-ordinating research-related activities in the broad area of ‘metabolism and health’, enabling sharing of expertise and resources and identifying collaborative and strategic opportunities. She supports the BRC Diabetes and Metabolism theme by working with theme researchers and their colleagues to identify activities and leverage additional funding that strengthen the theme and the Oxford BRC overall.