Ezio Bonifacio, PhD at UMass Diabetes Day - May 7, 2019
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“Auto antibodies as predictors of type 1 diabetes”
Dr. Bonifacio was born and trained in Perth, Australia. He moved to London as a post-doctoral scientist to work on type 1 diabetes prediction, and subsequently moved to Milan, where he studied the autoimmune response to beta cell antigens in settings that include pre-clinical type 1 diabetes and islet transplantation.
He is a professor and and Director at the Center for Regenerative Therapies in the Faculty of Medicine, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. He was instrumental in developing and standardizing tools to measure autoimmunity against beta cells. Together with Anette Ziegler he has applied these tools towards understanding prediction, pathogenesis, and prevention of type 1 diabetes in children. Dr. Bonifacio has shown that islet autoimmunity often initiates against insulin in a narrow window from 6 months to 2 years of age, and that this age is relatively restricted to the development of beta cell autoimmunity suggesting a direct role of the pancreas in the initiation process. He has also shown that children who develop beta cell autoimmunity, already have autoreactive CD4+ T cells that respond to autoantigen with a pro-inflammatory signature at 6 months of age.