Stephen Rich, PhD, What Genetics Can Tell Us About Type 1 Diabetes Risk.

Stephen Rich, PhD, Professor of Genome Sciences
Transcript
As a scientist, I think we have to be very curious about how the world works and the people in it. And as a geneticist, even though we share about 99.9% of the human genome, you can look around and see incredible variation, not only variation in how people look and behave, but their risk for disease. And that's what is really inspiring and causing my curiosity in our work in science. Hi, I'm Steve Rich. I'm a professor of genome sciences in the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and our laboratory focuses on the genetic basis of complex human disease, and particularly type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease in which there’s some event that causes your own immune system to attack the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. And we're focused on understanding that genetic variation and how it may lead to dysfunction of the system, causing mainly children to develop type 1 diabetes and require insulin for survival. So our research is really focused on using genetics as a tool to predict who may be developing or at risk of developing type 1 diabetes, since about 90 to 95% of those who develop it have no symptoms, no family history. So this is something that we can utilize to help identify those who might be eligible for treatment with an FDA-approved drug that delays onset by three years and perhaps with additional research, even longer.