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University of Wisconsin–Madison

Building a Translational Research Pipeline to Personalize Diabetes Prevention and Treatment

This project establishes the Diabetes Research Accelerator for Wisconsin (DRAW), a data registry and biobank of individuals with diabetes, as a next step toward delivering personalized diabetes care and facilitating interdisciplinary translational diabetes research at UW–Madison.

The long-term goal of this line of research is to improve the health for over 29 million people in the United States with type 1 or type 2 diabetes (T1D or T2D). Over 70% of diabetes patients do not achieve adequate blood sugar control, leading to significantly shortened healthy life and life-altering complications such as blindness, amputation, kidney failure, heart attack, and stroke. Although numerous treatment options and resources are available to help people manage their diabetes, often healthcare providers cannot specifically recommend which treatment is most likely to be effective for a given patient, resulting in a trial-and-error approach. Personalizing diabetes care could support successful early intervention and reduce the costs of failed treatments by addressing a host of biologic, environmental, and psychosocial risk factors. By building the DRAW resource, scientists at UW–Madison can more efficiently expand their ground-breaking work to human clinical populations.

Principal Investigator

  • Elizabeth Cox
    Associate Professor of Pediatrics

Co-Principal Investigators

  • Dawn Davis
    Associate Professor of Medicine
  • Michelle Kimple
    Associate Professor of Medicine

Co-Investigators

  • Jennifer Laffin
    Associate Professor of Pediatrics – Genetics and Metabolism
  • Mari Palta
    Professor of Population Health Sciences
  • Ying Ge
    Associate Professor of Chemistry

 Collaborators

  • Alan Attie
    Professor of Biochemistry
  • Vincent Cryns
    Professor of Medicine
  • Feyza Engin
    Assistant Professor of Medicine
  • Dudley Lamming
    Assistant Professor of Medicine
  • Tamara LeCaire
    Assistant Scientist in Population Health Sciences
  • Kristina Matkowskyi
    Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
  • Federico Rey
    Assistant Professor of Bacteriology
  • Umberto Tachinardi
    Associate Dean for Biomedical Informatics
  • Chi-Liang Eric Yen
    Associate Professor of Nutritional Sciences