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Dr. von Herrath is the Director of the Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research at La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at UCSD. Dr. von Herrath's research focuses on strategies to prevent type 1 diabetes through the induction of regulatory T cells. He wrote his thesis in the field of Glucose-Biochemistry and then received his M.D. in Medicine from the Freiburg Medical School in Germany in 1988. He did his residency work at the Freiburg Medical Center in the Internal Medicine/Immunology department and at the Diakonic Hospital's Intensive Care Unit in Freiburg. For his postdoctoral work, Dr. von Herrath went to The Scripps Research Institute and worked in its Virology and Immunology departments.
Dr. von Herrath is an editor and reviewer for numerous publications as well as being a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and a Council Member for the International Diabetes Society. In addition, he is the recipient of the 2006 Grotzky Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International, a 2007-2012 Scholar Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the recipient of the outstanding scientific ('Lilly') achievement award by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 2008.
Combination therapies in recent-onset type 1 diabetes
Our GOAL is to to pre-clinically test suitable combination therapies using short term administrations of systemically acting immune modulators such as anti-CD3 or anti-CD20, which are currently in clinical trials and combine them with approaches to achieve antigen specific tolerance to beta cells. Among these are DNA vaccines first described by our team in 1999, mucosal tolerance using nasal or oral insulin as well as peptide or protein based therapeutics (for example collaborative work with Diamyd's GAD). The aim is to enhance efficacy and reduce undesirable systemic side effects from immunosuppression. The challenge is to control immune memory T cells to islet antigens long-term.
Live imaging of islet destruction by 2-photon microscopy
Our GOAL here is to observe the entry and mode of action under live conditions of islet destructive autoreactive CD8 T cells and study how they can be regulated once they have reached the pancreas in vivo. We have developed a technique that allows to image live islets under attack in vivo.
Viral infections and T1D
In collaboration with nPOD we have begun to systematically test, whether signs of viral footprints such as MHC class i upregulation or interferon production as well as antiviral CD8 cells can be found in human islets of patients with type 1a diabetes. So far our findings show autoreactive CD8 cells are present (in collaboration with Bart Roep) and that many islets
exhibit high levels of class I without major signs of immune infiltration.
Viral infections and Tregs
Our GOAL here is to understand, how virus infections influence the effector functions and trafficking of regulatory T cells. Stability of natural and induced Tregs is important to understand for optimizing their therapeutic induction and use. Antigen specific Treg therapy, in our opinion, constitutes the holy grail of immunotherapy for type 1 diabetes, because they can act locally in the pancreatic lymph node and islets almost like a site-specific drug delivery vehicle thus circumventing systemic side effects and because they can bystander suppressive multiple autoaggressive T cell specificities, which appear to be present in
patients with advanced T1D.
Cytokines in T1D
Our goal here is to understand which cytokines are regulatory and which cytokines are destructive for beta cells. Current efforts focus on Il-21, IL-17, IL-10, IL-4, TGF-beta and interferon gamma. better understanding how cytokines regulate T1D pathogenesis will enable us to targetedly use them as biomarkers for aggressive and regulatory T cells and thus improve therapeutic options for T1D.