Translational approaches to disease modifying therapy of type 1 diabetes: an innovative approach towards understanding and arresting type 1 diabetes – sofia ref.: 115797
Preclinical type 1 diabetes (T1D) research has made important advances in recent years, but less progress has been made in translating findings from in vitro and animal models into effective clinical interventions. INNODIA aims to achieve a breakthrough in the way in which we study T1D to enable us to move closer towards prevention and cure of T1D. To this end, INNODIA joins together the leading European experts from the fields of basic and clinical T1D research, four leading pharmaceutical companies with strong expertise in the discovery and development of diabetes medicines and the two leading public organizations involved in T1D research into one comprehensive collaborative consortium. The clinicians in INNODIA oversee T1D registries and have access to large populations of children and adults with T1D and family members at increased risk of developing the disease. The basic science researchers are experts in beta-cell pathophysiology, immunology, biomarker discovery, bioinformatics, systems biology and clinical trial design. INNODIA will accelerate understanding of T1D through coordinated studies of unique clinical samples and translation-oriented preclinical models. This should deliver novel biomarkers and interventions for testing in appropriately designed trials, to be developed in active collaboration with regulators and patients. INNODIA provides access to unique historical biorepositories and will create the Clinical Sample Network, a clinical EU infrastructure to recruit T1D subjects at diagnosis and at-risk relatives. These individuals will be deep-phenotyped and will provide biosamples, allowing the establishment of a ‘living biobank’ of subjects consented for recall. They will be characterized using standardized clinical, genetic and metabolic phenotyping procedures, including prospective, longitudinal sample collection to facilitate novel biomarker discovery. Diverse biological samples (blood, plasma, serum, urine, stools, etc.) will be collected at