Welcome to the Diabetes Program in Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine! We invite patients, family members, physicians, scientists, and anyone interested in finding new treatments for diabetes to learn about our current efforts, and to contact us with questions or ideas.

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Whichever group you belong to, you are likely aware of two facts: First, that diabetes is a terrible epidemic, placing a tremendous burden on patients, their loved ones, and our entire health care system. Second, that diabetes is a very complex disease, which can affect many organ systems, impacted by both genetics and environment, so that nearly every patient has a somewhat unique disease. For this reason, we believe that progress in diabetes research can be best achieved in the context of “patient-specific” or “precision” medicine.

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And that is why we started this Program. For the first time in history, we are in position to define the molecular basis for each patient’s disease, and to search for therapies that can treat that specific cause. This is possible due to three transformative technological breakthroughs. We can now generate stem cells from a small donation of patient blood cells. We can use the stem cells to generate diabetes-relevant cells (such as insulin-secreting beta cells) that are genetically identical to the patient. Finally, we can edit patient-specific gene variants in order to determine if and how these variants contribute to the disease. With these research tools in hand, we developed a platform to use our understanding of the patient-specific disease to screen for possible drugs to treat that specific cause.

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Sound simple? It’s all feasible but definitely not simple. And so we need your help. We are collecting blood samples from patients with diverse forms of diabetes to generate a bank of stem cells that will reflect the genetic and medical diversity of diabetes. The research is expensive, so your financial contributions are also greatly appreciated – 100% of which goes directly to support the research program.

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Please use the website and associated links to learn more about diabetes research and how you can get involved. We would love to hear from you.

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Sincerely,

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Shuibing Chen, Ph.D., Kilts Family Associate Professor in Surgery, Director

Todd Evans, Ph.D., Peter I Pressman Professor in Surgery, co-Director