Defining mechanisms for pancreatic beta-cell dysfunction in type 2 diabetes (360G-Wellcome-200837_Z_16_Z)

The over-arching aim of my research vision is to identify effective therapeutic targets for type 2 diabetes (T2D) treatment through mechanistic studies of proteins causally implicated in T2D risk by human genetics. To achieve this I plan to capitalise on my ability to work at genome-scale to unlock the effector transcripts at genome-wide association study loci and to use state-of-the art genomic techniques in recently developed human beta-cell models to understand what these proteins do in beta-cells, how they contribute to defects in insulin secretion, what networks they are involved in and how we can leverage this new knowledge to identify therapeutic targets.