Human Islet Research Network (HIRN) T1D Knowledgebase Program

May 2022 Council

Lead Division/Office

DEM

Point(s) of Contact

Executive Summary

One major grand challenge in Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) is that the exact disease etiology still not fully understood. We do not know what triggers the disease initiation, how triggering events lead to perpetuating β-cell destruction, nor how the interactions of on-site cell types contribute. Solving this challenge is critical for early detection, prevention and for understanding its heterogeneity and subtypes. This initiative proposes to develop a T1D pancreas knowledgebase, powered by systems biology. It will contain a database that maintains core datasets of the T1D pancreas, deep curated with meta data, and relevant domain knowledge in actionable forms, and a library of analytics, workflows, and computational modeling pipelines. It will offer an open science platform for scientists from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, to leverage existing data, knowledge, and tools toward innovation and discovery in solving this T1D grand challenge. It will be a program under the Human Islet Research Network (HIRN), to maximally leverage its PIs, community, and collaborative infrastructure. It will engage the T1D and the broad community to contribute and to participate in governance. We envision it to be forward thinking both in science and in technology and be infrastructure building.