Monday, May 21, 2018

Diabetes Research Achievements at Boston Children’s Hospital


An accomplished leader in the reinsurance and risk management industries, Gabriel Holschneider brings nearly two decades of experience to his current position as the CEO of the Rainmaker Group, a Mexico City-based company that he founded. Also a noted philanthropist, Gabriel Holschneider is a prominent supporter of health care organizations such as Boston Children’s Hospital.

One of the world’s leading institutions devoted to pediatric medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital maintains specialty centers and medical divisions devoted to treatment and research for brain and heart conditions, newborn medicine, and pulmonary and respiratory issues, among others. Additionally, the hospital maintains an award-winning endocrinology department, which focuses on improving care and furthering research for glandular and pancreatic disorders.

Among notable achievements, researchers affiliated with the Boston Children’s Hospital endocrinology department made a key breakthrough in diabetes treatment. For many years, medical researchers believed that inflammation related to obesity was a key factor in causing Type 2 diabetes. However, research conducted by Dr. Umut Ozcan and his team suggests that the opposite may be true.

The team looked at the behavior of the XPB1 protein, which modulates the stress response to inflammation in a cell, in relation to another protein, p38 MAPK. Surprisingly, they found that the XPB1 protein relied on the p38 MAPK protein to effectively moderate glucose and insulin sensitivity. Even more surprising was that the p38 MAPK protein required an inflammatory environment to be activated. As such, Dr. Ozcan suggested that controlled inflammation may actually be beneficial for diseases such as diabetes.