Seminar title
The eye as a body window to diabetes: Pancreatic islet transplantation in the anterior chamber of the eye to treat diabetes mellitus

Abstract
Today, already more than 400 million people suffering from diabetes worldwide, and diabetes is spreading like an epidemic, challenging healthcare systems. For type 2 diabetes and its severe complications, the primary focus is to identify novel and more specific druggable targets to design new drugs for more effective treatments. In type 1 diabetes, a major problem is to improve the success rate of islet transplantation. It became clear that the liver is not the optimal site for islet transplantation, therefore, better loci are urgently required that support pancreatic islet function and survival. Since diabetes is a heterogeneous disease, there is an immediate need for the development of novel personalized pharmacological treatment strategies, calling for precise in vivo readout systems. By using the anterior chamber of the eye as a transplantation site and the cornea as a natural body window, we can image islet cell biology in vivo, non-invasively, longitudinally at single cell resolution. Using this in vivo imaging approach for metabolic islet cell imaging, reporter islet cell imaging, islet cell signaling, immune islet cell biology will be rpesented. Clinical islet transplantation in the eye and how this approach can be applied to discover key regulatory steps in islet cell signal-transduction will be presented, along with insights into exploiting this living window approach for treating the disease.

Speaker
Per-Olof Berggren is a world-leader in the field of cell therapy of diabetes, pancreatic islet cell function and survival. He is Head of Cell Biology and Experimental Endocrinology and Director of the world-leading Rolf Luft Center for Diabetes and Endocrinology Research at Karolinska Institute (Stockholm), leading a large team of outstanding basic and clinical research scientists working at the forefront of diabetes research. Peer Olof is also Professor Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology at Ulster directing the islet research programme, employing new strategies to image islet function and improve islet transplantation outcomes in diabetes, and he is Head of Cell Biology and Signal Transduction and the Mary Lou Held Visiting Scientist at the Diabetes Research Institute at University of Miami.

Professor Berggren published more than 500 original scientific works in cellular physiology, signal transduction and experimental diabetes research including pioneering work on the fundamental mechanisms regulating the stimulus-response coupling in the endocrine pancreas. He made seminal contributions in insulin secreting pancreatic beta cell Ca2+ handling, phosphorylated inositol compounds and insulin receptor operated signalling.

His most recent innovation uses cell imaging techniques to study in real-time the functional pathways of islets transplanted into the anterior chamber of the eye – an immune privileged site which may afford a breakthrough for cell therapy of type 1 diabetes.

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If you wish to meet Prof Berggren, please contact Imre Berger.