Our immune systems do a great job protecting us from the many microbes that could make us sick. To achieve this the immune system has a remarkable ability to distinguish ourselves from all other living things. This allows it to ‘attack’ foreign things which may do us harm, while not harming the cells and tissues of our bodies. Our work in the Human T-cell Laboratory, at St. Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research focuses on type 1 diabetes. This disease develops when the immune system destroys the cells that make insulin. Insulin is a hormone that is essential for our bodies to maintain a stable concentration of glucose (‘blood sugar’). When people can’t make enough insulin to control their blood glucose they develop the disease called diabetes. Type 1 diabetes typically afflicts otherwise healthy children and adolescents. Currently there is no cure, but people with type 1 diabetes can live active lives by regularly measuring their blood glucose concentrations and injecting insulin several times per day. The long-term goal of our work is to understand ‘how and why’ the immune system turns against the insulin-producing cells. In particular, we want to know what the immune cells ‘see’ on the insulin-producing cells that makes the immune cells target them. Once we know how this works we will be able to find new ways to stop this process. In this way we hope to develop new therapies that will prevent type 1 diabetes and eventually cure people who are already diagnosed.
Listed skills include Biochemistry, Flow Cytometry, Molecular Biology, Cell Culture, and 10 others.
