We've had a flurry of activity this week at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, including our first snowstorm of the year. In between shoveling, we took a few minutes to dig into the latest research news.
Fitness tools that monitor your daily use of energy, from counting steps to tracking sleep, have exploded in popularity. Researchers are developing better noninvasive, high-resolution methods to estimate how well the fundamental source of that energy - your mitochondria - are working, and they have recently had some important successes. Mitochondria are the tiny energy factories of our cells,
Christoph Seiler, PhD, received a Foerderer Fund for Excellence award at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2015 to study this mechanism. German-born Dr. Seiler pointed out that “Foerderer,” in German, means supporter or sponsor. Its name is therefore apt, because the internal award program spurs research projects that need a bit of support to generate pilot data that can later help those projects stand out in the competitive awarding of external funds.
Certain defects in the way the mitochondria work may lead to diabetes, and the ways our bodies adapt to high blood sugars share many features with the ways our bodies respond to mitochondrial disease.
Revolutionizing our understanding of the genetic causes and mechanisms of hyperinsulinism, developing diagnostic tools for a precision-medicine approach to treatment, and discovering new treatment options.
The Congenital Hyperinsulinism Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is working on a research study to better understand how people with hyperinsulinism may have different blood sugar responses to certain tests (like fasting or drinking a high-protein shake) when compared to people without hyperinsulinism.
We are doing this study to see if the patterns of abnormalities in controlling insulin in children and adults with hyperinsulinism are related to any underlying genetic cause and to identify possible new genetic causes.
