The last time PhD student Jasmine Maghera spoke with her teenage mentee, the younger girl made her heart sink.
“She felt like nobody was doing anything.”
The mentee was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2020, which made it more difficult for her to connect with others who share her diagnosis. Meeting Maghera gave her a chance to meet someone else with Type 1, and to learn about all of the work the PhD student and her colleagues are doing to improve life for people with diabetes.
Maghera, who was diagnosed when she was 11, remembers being told that five years from her diagnosis she wouldn’t need to take insulin anymore: technology would make injecting insulin obsolete.
“Five years went by and nothing happened, and another five years went by and nothing happened. Now I’ve passed 15 years and there’s no widespread treatment yet. This is an immensely complex problem to solve.”
Now Maghera’s goal is to create and share that technology — if not for herself, for future generations. And she’s not alone.
— professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, Dr. Charles A. Allard Chair in Diabetes Research and director of the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ Diabetes Institute — says that over the last few years, he’s noticed that a number of the grad students at the institute studying Type 1 diabetes are also living with the disease.
Like Maghera, these students strive to offer better treatments and quality of life for people like them, and have been just as active helping their community outside of the lab.
“The institute has a desire to add value to the community, predominantly people with diabetes, by having information sessions where we describe the research we’re doing or how this applies to them,” says Senior. “But for me, it’s great to see these students going out on their own to give back to the community.”
Having researchers who know what it’s like to live with Type 1 is also an advantage for the institute, he notes, because it helps them answer questions that are relevant to people with the disease.
Helping more grad students like Maghera succeed in the lab and in the community is the idea behind a gift from the Chan family that will create a lasting legacy to fund annual awards.
“Our family has been directly impacted by both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and we are pleased to help support those grad students and post-doc fellows who live with diabetes,” says Sonia Yung on behalf of the family. “An investment in their well-being ensures the best-in-class research at the ADI continues with the next generation of researchers who will lead the way to a future where diabetes is not just managed, but conquered.”
A better tomorrow
For Alice Carr — a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry with graduate student award funding from the Morley and Val Blanch Family — the question is what is the best level of functioning for insulin-producing cells, and how that can best be measured.
Pancreatic beta cells produce insulin — or at least they’re supposed to. In people with Type 1 diabetes, the cells either don’t make insulin at all or don’t make enough to properly regulate glucose in the bloodstream.
Beta cells are found within small clusters of other hormone-producing cells called the pancreatic islets. Currently, the best way to restore functional insulin production in people with Type 1 diabetes is through an islet cell transplant.
“Dr. (James) Shapiro’s group has created an islet cell transplant protocol that uses islets from people who have passed and donated their pancreas,” explains Maghera. “We take those islets and we can put them into patients, but there are a few limitations with that.”
One limitation is that there aren’t enough donors for everyone with Type 1 diabetes to have a transplant. Another is that patients have to stay on anti-rejection drugs to prevent their immune systems from attacking the foreign cells.
Maghera is working with pancreatic beta cells to create better cells derived from stem cells — aiming to create an unlimited supply of cells that someday won’t elicit an immune response.
She also recently assisted PhD candidate with his , a participatory research project in which “patient partners” living with Type 1 diabetes shared their experiences living with the disease, with the goal of recommending changes to clinical practice and improving care. Maghera is producing paintings that illustrate themes from the study’s data, with an art exhibit planned for Diabetes Awareness Month next November.
In the meantime, other researchers are working on improving islet cell transplantation. That was the focus for Saloni Aggarwal, who was diagnosed with Type 1 four years ago and graduated from the U of A with a master’s in science in surgery last fall.
Aggarwal explains that one of the challenges with islet cell transplantation is that a lot of the cells die after being introduced to a new host, which reduces the effectiveness of the transplant.
