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.

Boston Children’s Hospital and Alexion Pharmaceuticals Collaborate

A successful business executive and attorney, Gabriel Holschneider is the founder of the Rainmaker Group, a Mexico City-based consultancy that assists insurance providers in optimizing risk management strategies. Gabriel Holschneider is committed to philanthropic work and supports several charitable organizations, including Boston Children’s Hospital. 

The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Boston Children’s Hospital and Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., are working together to provide an accurate and rapid diagnosis for patients suspected of having rare diseases. The Manton Center specializes in decoding and treating rare diseases, and Alexion Pharmaceuticals provides expertise in genomics and data science.

Alexion is offering its 20 Rare Disease Questions (20RDQ) platform, which contains an artificial intelligence engine that assists physicians in diagnosing patients suspected of having a rare disease. Providing doctors with a guided sequence of questions that helps them explore the subtle signs and symptoms of rare diseases, the 20RDQ platform can also be used with genome sequencing to generate a list of genetic variants of rare diseases.

Boston Children’s Hospital May Have Found Cure for Type 1 Diabetes

Gabriel Holschneider is an attorney, an entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Rainmaker Group. As a dedicated philanthropist, Gabriel Holschneider supports a number of charitable organizations, including Boston Children’s Hospital.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are hoping to commence clinical trials on a treatment that uses a patient’s blood cells to treat type 1 diabetes. The same procedure has proven to be successful for treating mice with type 1 diabetes, in that all the animals studied were cured for a short time and one-third were cured for life.

This new treatment has the potential to cure type 1 diabetes by changing the way the immune system functions. Similar studies have attempted to use immunotherapy to cure type 1 diabetes by using a patient’s blood cells to stimulate the immune system.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are currently working with scientists from the San Diego-based company Fate Therapeutics to design a pill that will modulate stem cells in the blood to treat type 1 diabetes. They have even had a meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in hopes of commencing a human clinical trial.