Diabetes Endocrinology Research Center

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DESCRIPTION, OVERALL (provided by applicant): We seek to establish a Diabetes Endocrinology Research Center (DERC) at Baylor College of Medicine. The DERC will promote diabetes research among a diverse biomedical research base that spans clinical metabolism and nutrition, type 1 and type 2 diabetes and their macrovascular and microvascular complications, lipid homeostasis, adipose biology and energy metabolism, basic molecular and cellular biology, molecular endocrinology, islet biology and gene therapy. Baylor College of Medicine has an extremely strong ongoing biomedical research base in diabetes/endocrinology that can be categorized into four major areas: [1] clinical diabetes research, [2] basic and translational research, [3] molecular endocrinology, and [4] adipogenesis, with membership representing 10 departments and multiple disciplines. The DERC will foster interactions and facilitate collaboration among diabetes/endocrinology researchers, and entice nondiabetes researchers to commit to diabetes research. It will interact with and strengthen existing Research Centers and NIH Training Programs at Baylor and set up new enrichment programs. With College support, the PI (Dr. Chan) set up a highly successful pilot DERC Pilot & Feasibility (P/F) Program in 2004 and, in the last two years, has used internal College funds to support 4 P/F projects selected from 78 applications (2 each from 44 applications in 2004 and 34 applications in 2006) from 10 departments. The DERC will support diabetes research through the following Research Core Laboratories: Clinical Translational Investigation, Microarray, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Proteomics, Gene Vector, Mouse Phenotyping, and Nonhuman Primate (in collaboration with the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio), that will support diabetes research of DERC faculty and of P/F projects. The DERC will further broaden the diabetes research base at Baylor College of Medicine, while generating strong synergism with other programs and institutions in the Texas Medical Center and in the greater Southwest United States.