UF is home to new pancreas research depository

December 4, 2007

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Type 1 diabetes is a disease which affects at least 1 million Americans. One of the newest additions to the University of Florida’s College of Medicine is working to help them.

The Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors, or nPOD, is the College of Medicine’s new center for international study of the human pancreas and its relation to diabetes, said Mark Atkinson, director of nPOD.

“The pancreas plays a central role in diabetes, as it acts like a brain telling the rest of the body how to react to food,” Atkinson said. “It produces insulin, but in people with type 1 diabetes the body’s own immune system attacks the insulin-producing cells, so your body can’t produce enough insulin.”

The UF center acts as a clearing house for pancreas study, as organs are received and studied, and tissues are sent out to other facilities.

“Gainesville is like a FedEx hub for pancreas research,” Atkinson said. “Pancreases will come here from across the country. We take in and process them, and then send some of the tissues onward for further study.”

This system works thanks to a collaboration between the UF researchers, scientists at other universities and organ donations to the United Network for Organ Sharing. When the United Network for Organ Sharing receives a pancreas from a donor who was positive for type 1 diabetes, they send the organ to nPOD. UF’s nPOD hopes to soon include organs from donors who showed signs they were in the developmental stages of the disease.

“If we get organs from people who were in the process of development of the disease, it gives us the opportunity to see how the disease develops,” Atkinson said.

This is also a great opportunity to see how correct the conventional wisdom surrounding the disease is, said Atkinson. Most current knowledge of diabetes is based on autopsies from the 1960s.

“We have newer tools now than we did in the 1960s, and we want to use these tools to see if the dogmas about type 1 diabetes we set into place 30, 40 or 50 years ago still apply,” Atkinson said.