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RSS SubscribeMonday 14th September 2009
ERC Starting Grant kick-starts independent diabetes research
by CORDIS
The European Research Council (ERC) has given the green light to a scientist and her research team to study the onset of albuminuria, an indicator of kidney disease. The ERC funding scheme, known as the Starting Grant, allows researchers at the early stages of their career to pursue independent study.
Dr Sanna Lehtonen of the University of Helsinki in Finland is one of over 200 early-stage research leaders to receive up to €2 million in funding (for a period of 5 years) from the ERC’s latest Starting Grant round. This follows the first funding wave of 2007, in which 299 recipients were successful in receiving the go-ahead from the ERC to work on their self-devised programmes and research areas.
The Starting Grant scheme fulfils an important role in allowing up-and-coming science leaders the opportunity to break away from supervised work in order to head their own research team. Importantly, the grant scheme also affords applicants the freedom to propose their own ideas, instead of applying to a call with a prescribed set of research topics.
“Receiving the ERC grant was really fantastic news for me. Now, we can finally do some things that we were earlier able to only think and dream about,” said Dr Lehtonen, whose team will use the funding to study a serious diabetes complication in a project called DiaDrug.
Known as nephropathy, this complication is developed by up to one third of diabetes sufferers. Its earliest sign, microalbuminuria, may even lead to renal disease that would ultimately require dialysis or a kidney transplant.
An increase in the risk of diabetic nephropathy has been linked to insulin resistance. The two key objectives of DiaDrug are to study the connection between this resistance and the development of albuminuria, and to better understand the mechanisms leading to the development of insulin resistance in podocytes (glomerular epithelial cells).
According to Dr Lehtonen, podocytes have recently been found to be insulin responsive and to increase their glucose uptake during insulin stimulation. “Our studies concentrate on analysing the role of insulin signalling and glucose transport and the regulation of actin cytoskeleton in podocytes, thereby aiming to define the mechanisms leading to perturbations in the kidney ultrafiltration function and development of albuminuria,” she explained.
Dr Lehtonen, who has been developing her studies in the field since the early 1990s, hopes to identify drug leads that may eventually lead to a treatment for the early stages of nephropathy.
“Diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate worldwide. Renal complication is the most serious of its complications and is also associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” Dr Lehtonen noted.
“Treating diabetes consumes a large bulk of the healthcare costs in all countries, and therefore understanding the mechanisms leading to the development of the complications, especially nephropathy, [and] identifying it at an earlier stage and finding novel drug targets and drugs to prevent the progression of the complication are currently under intensive research.”
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