Congratulations to Grace Riddell who won the Best Presenter Award April 27 at this year’s Regenerative Medicine Symposium: Uncovering New Pathways to Promote Regeneration, for her presentation on “Examining the Effect of Supra-Physiological Insulin in an In Vitro Human Insulin Infusion Cannula Host Response Model.”
The annual Regenerative Medicine Symposium is hosted by the CIHR Training Program in Regenerative Medicine. Their mandate is to ensure that there will be qualified researchers and practitioners to develop and practice in this field which has the potential to greatly reduce medical and social costs, to provide qualified, innovative personnel for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, and to prolong and improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Canadians.
Grace is an MASc student in Dr. Lindsay Fitzpatrick’s lab where her thesis project aims to better characterize the human host response to the implantable cannula used in continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII), better known as insulin pump therapy. More specifically, she is interested in exploring the interactions between the body’s immune cells and the adsorbed protein layers that form around these implants as part of a characteristic “foreign body reaction.” Characterizing these pathways allows for a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive host response – and ultimately rejection – of these devices. To do so, she is using an in-vitro insulin infusion cannula host response model to study the activation of responding inflammatory cells under various experimental conditions to recapitulate an in vivo response to these devices. As part of this project, she will be isolating macrophage cells from individuals with Type 1 Diabetes to examine their activation under different inflammatory conditions in the presence of supraphysiological insulin concentrations, like those present at an infusion site. Not only will these experiments help identify the immunological driving factors behind infusion site failure, but they will also allow for the identification of potential inhibitor candidates that may be used to mitigate the host response to these implants.