Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center unites U-M efforts

Updated 4:00 PM September 28, 2005

Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center unites U-M efforts

By Kara Gavin
UMHS Public Relations

Experts at the Medical School already are national leaders in the fight against diabetes, a family of diseases that has reached epidemic proportions and threatens to kill or disable millions in future decades.

But a new center launched this month by the University will unite their efforts, increase communication, encourage scientific cooperation within and beyond U-M, and accelerate progress against diabetes and its complications.

The Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center (MCDC) will provide an umbrella for U-M's many diabetes researchers and patient care providers, who seek better scientific understanding and treatment for all forms of diabetes and the harmful effects they can wreak on the kidneys, heart, nerves, eyes, limbs and immune system. Under that umbrella will be five U-M centers devoted to studying different aspects of the disease, as well as clinical diabetes experts throughout the U-M Health System.

Dr. Peter Arvan will serve as MCDC's interim director. He is chief of the Metabolism, Endocrinology & Diabetes Division of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical School, and the William K. and Delores S. Brehm Professor of Type I Diabetes Research.

In November 2004, the Brehms gave $44 million to U-M to fund research, facilities and faculty positions aimed at accelerating the search for a cure for Type 1 diabetes, sometimes called juvenile diabetes. Part of their gift will support the MCDC. The rest of the initial budget for the MCDC will come from the Medical School, says its dean Dr. Allen S. Lichter, but donations and grants will be essential to providing a base of funding that will allow the MCDC to support research and education.

The MCDC is being launched as a virtual center within the Medical School, and will be housed in existing and planned facilities. In July, the Board of Regents approved construction of a new building that will house the Brehm Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research and Analysis and the MCDC, as well as eye research and care.

"Diabetes and its complications are a major public health issue, and today's obesity epidemic will create even worse problems related to Type 2 diabetes in the future," Arvan says. "The more coordinated we are today, the better the impact tomorrow on science, on patient care, and on the lives of people with diabetes and their families."

The MCDC will be led by an operating committee that will include the leaders of the five U-M centers already devoted to diabetes research: the Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center, led by Dr. William Herman; the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Center for the Study of Complications in Diabetes, led by Dr. Eva Feldman; the Brehm Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research and Analysis, currently in development; the Center for the Animal Models of Diabetes Complications Consortium, headed by Dr. Frank (Chip) Brosius; and the Michigan Center for Metabolism, a proposed new center to be headed by Dr. Charles Burant.

An executive committee of Medical School leaders will guide operations.

Arvan plans to establish a new diabetes grand rounds lecture series that will bring diabetes researchers and clinicians together each week for lectures by speakers from U-M and around the country. He also hopes to begin a grant program that will encourage researchers from different disciplines to cooperate on projects.

Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center unites U-M efforts

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