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Description
Diabetes is one of the fastest growing health challenges of the 21st century, characterized by chronic hyperglycaemia due to the inability of the body to produce and/or use sufficient insulin. Despite major advances, self-management of diabetes remains challenging. In diabetes, the cellular protection mechanism fails without relieving the burden and ultimately the cells die. Our project aims to characterize these cellular protection mechanisms during diabetes progression. We plan to define the stress threshold that β-cells withstand without being affected irreversibly. Moreover, we will use the results to design strategies to modulate the protection mechanisms to get a better response of β-cells to sustained stress. We plan to achieve a clinically relevant therapeutic approach to regenerate β-cells function from diabetic pancreas. This is aimed at helping the β-cells’ secretory performance by improving their capacity to cope with increased load, thus restoring insulin levels. Our strategy will have an important impact, helping design better treatments for management of diabetes. We envisage that our collaboration will establish a long-term partnership between ICBP “N. Simionescu” and University of Bergen. We expect it will promote the translational research impact of both groups, while also expanding their research capacity by increasing the number of young researchers trained in a high-quality scientific environment. This will ultimately enhance the research performance in the Romanian Institute and increase young Romanian scientists’ potential of for further applications to EU framework programmes calls and other international funding sources.