Clinical Diabetes
The Clinical Diabetes research group is a multi-disciplinary team using a wide range of state of the art approaches to provide practical solutions to the problems of people living with all types of diabetes.
The group aims to provide tailored solutions for patients:
• To improve prediction, diagnosis and classification of an individual’s diabetes.
• To improve treatment and develop approaches for identifying the most appropriate treatment for an individual.
• To identify individuals at risk of complications of diabetes and limit or prevent these.
• To improve understanding of pathogenesis of diabetes types with clinical studies
• To maintain a healthy lifestyle including increasing and maintaining appropriate exercise levels, reducing sedentary time, achieving and maintaining a healthy weight and eating healthily.
The team combines clinicians, laboratory scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, molecular geneticists, statisticians, modellers, clinical trialists, physiologists and expert patients.
The group's expertise includes: precision approaches to diabetes, improving diagnosis, using models in clinical care, integrating biomarkers and genetics with clinical predictors, C peptide, islet autoantibodies, artificial intelligence approaches, utilising routine data and trial data in validated models, understanding hypoglycaemia, Type 1 diabetes in infancy and old age, Clinical care of monogenic diabetes, bariatric surgery, exercise and diabetes, dietary interventions and development of education programmes.
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Professor Andrew Hattersley | Professor of Molecular Medicine, Clinical Director, NIHR Clinical Research Facility, Honorary Consultant |
| Professor Inês Barroso | Professor of Diabetes |
| Associate Professor Rob Andrews | Honorary Consultant in Diabetes |
| Associate Professor Angus Jones | NIHR Clinician Scientist/ Honorary Consultant Physician |
| Associate Professor Richard Oram | Diabetes UK Harry Keen Fellow/ Honorary Consultant Physician |
| Dr Beverley Shields | Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics |
| Dr. Kashyap Patel | Welcome Trust Career Development Fellow/Honorary Consultant Physician |
| Independent Research Fellow in Medical Statistics | |
| Dr Harry Green | Independent Research Fellow |
| Dr Lauren Rodgers | Research fellow |
| Dr Pamela Bowman | Postdoctoral Clinical Research Fellow |
| Honorary Associate Professor Tim McDonald | NIHR Clinical Scientist and NHS consultant |
| Professor Maggie Shepherd | Diabetes Education lead. Honorary Clinical Professor |
| Dr Julia Prague | NHS consultant and honorary Senior lecturer |
| Brittany Resnick | Diabetes Research nurse |
| Alice Carr | PhD Student |
| Dr Alice Hughes | Wellcome-funded GW4-CAT, PhD student GW4 Clinical Academic Training Fellow |
| Sam Stone | Graduate Business Partner |
| Kathryn Hinton | PhD Student |
| Anxious Jackson Niwaha | PhD Student |
| Catherine Angwin | PhD Student |
| Catherine Russon | PhD Student |
| Jean Claude Njabou Katte | PhD Student |
| Nick Thomas | PhD Student |
| Priscilla Balungi | PhD Student |
| Seth Sharp | PhD Student |
| Sian Louise Grace | PhD Student |
| Wisdom Nakanga | PhD Student |
| Dr Katie Young | Postdoctoral Research Associate |
| Dr Lauric Ferrat | Postdoctoral Research Fellow |
| Samual Stone | Laboratory & Clinical Research Assistant |
The group's funders include NIHR, MRC, Wellcome Trust, Diabetes UK, JDRF, Helmsley foundation and the European Union.
The group's collaborators include:
• University of Oxford
• University of Dundee
• Glasgow University
• Bristol University
• Cardiff University
• Newcastle University
• University of Birmingham
• Liverpool John Moores Univeristy
• MRC/UVRI & LSHTM Uganda Research Unit
• University of Younde
• Malawi Epidemiology and Intervention Research Unit
• Pacific North West Research Institute
• KEM Hospital Research Centre
• Madras Diabetes Research Foundation
• Baylor College of Medicine
• University of South Florida, University of Alberta
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Sandford Research
• Indiannapolis University
• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Recent and key publications
A combined risk score enhances prediction of type 1 diabetes among susceptible children. Ferrat LA, Vehik K, Sharp SA, Lernmark Å, Rewers MJ, She JX, Ziegler AG, Toppari J, Akolkar B, Krischer JP, Weedon MN, Oram RA, Hagopian WA; TEDDY Study Group; Committees.Nat Med. 2020 Aug;26(8):1247-1255. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0930-4. Epub 2020 Aug 7. PMID: 32770166;
Disease progression and treatment response in data-driven subgroups of type 2 diabetes compared with models based on simple clinical features: an analysis using clinical trial data. Dennis JM, Shields BM, Henley WE, Jones AG, Hattersley AT. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. 2019 Jun;7(6):442-451. doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(19)30087-7. Epub 2019 Apr 29. PMID: 31047901;
Frequency and phenotype of type 1 diabetes in the first six decades of life: a cross-sectional, genetically stratified survival analysis from UK Biobank. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. Thomas NJ, Jones SE, Weedon MN, Shields BM, Oram RA, Hattersley AT. 2018 Feb;6(2):122-129. doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(17)30362-5. Epub 2017 Nov 30. PMID: 29199115;.
A Type 1 Diabetes Genetic Risk Score Can Aid Discrimination Between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes in Young Adults. Oram RA, Patel K, Hill A, Shields B, McDonald TJ, Jones A, Hattersley AT, Weedon MN. Diabetes Care. 2016 Mar;39(3):337-44. doi: 10.2337/dc15-1111. Epub 2015 Nov 17. PMID: 26577414;
Prevalence of vascular complications among patients with glucokinase mutations and prolonged, mild hyperglycemia. Steele AM, Shields BM, Wensley KJ, Colclough K, Ellard S, Hattersley AT. JAMA. 2014 Jan 15;311(3):279-86. doi: 10.1001/ JAMA .2013.283980. PMID: 24430320.
Diet or diet plus physical activity versus usual care in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes: the Early ACTID randomised controlled trial. Andrews RC, Cooper AR, Montgomery AA, Norcross AJ, Peters TJ, Sharp DJ, Jackson N, Fitzsimons K, Bright J, Coulman K, England CY, Gorton J, McLenaghan A, Paxton E, Polet A, Thompson C, Dayan CM. Lancet. 2011 Jul 9;378(9786):129-39. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60442-X. Epub 2011 Jun 24. PMID: 21705068.
The Clinical Diabetes research group uses the following research facilities and technologies:
- Exeter Clinical Trials Unit (ExeCTU)
- MRI Imaging Suite
- The Exeter Sequencing Service
- NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF)
- High Performance Computing
More details of all of these can be found here.