Investigating the Regulation of Glucose Transport

What's the aim of this project?

There are over 420 million people living with diabetes. Diabetes is a major cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, stroke and lower limb amputation. It is the 7th leading cause of death world-wide and costs the UK £10 billion a year.

The single most important action of insulin is to promote glucose transport into skeletal and cardiac muscle and fat. Insulin-stimulated glucose transport is impaired in people with Type-2 diabetes.       This defective glucose transport lies at the heart of this disease and our work seeks to understand the causes of this impairment. Understanding how glucose transport is regulated in physiologically relevant cell systems is key to the development of novel therapeutics and/or identification of new potential drug targets to treat diabetes and ameliorate its consequences. Since Type2 diabetes is a heterogeneous disease with different potential root causes, it is important to group patients based on risk of disease or response to therapy. This project will potentially help with this ‘stratification’ or grouping of patients which is considered essential if precision medicine is to be developed for this condition.

We collaborate widely within the Glucose Transport field, participate in regular meetings and events - including Diabetes UK events - and actively seek to publish our work in a range of journals which reflect the 'highly visible' output of exciting new findings, to the 'solid' output of important data that provides the field with important insight and comparative data with the longer term goal of identifying therapeutic targets and better stratifying of patient groups.