Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory members include:- Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory The JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (JDRF/WT DIL), centred in the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, is a multi-disciplinary research programme within the department of Medical Genetics at the University of Cambridge. The current director is John Todd FMedSci FRS and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Cambridge. The goals of the JDRF/WT DIL are to identify and characterise the effects of the susceptibility genes for type 1 diabetes in order to better understand the earliest events in human physiology that lead to autoimmune destruction of the insulin-producing beta-cells of pancreas.
Diabetes mellitus type 2 had been found that contribute to the risk of type 2 diabetes. All of these genes together still only account for 10% of the total heritable component of the disease. The TCF7L2 allele, for example, increases the risk of developing diabetes by 1.5 times and is the greatest risk of the common genetic variants. Most of the genes linked to diabetes are involved in beta cell functions. There are a number of rare cases of diabetes that arise due to an abnormality in a single gene (known as monogenic forms of diabetes or "other specific types of diabetes"). These include