Howard Davidson
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Type 1 diabetes is the main cause of diabetes in young people. The immune system mistakenly destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, so patients need insulin for life.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
type 1 diabetes
autoimmune diabetes
partial remission
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Define and validate classifiers that predict fast or slow type 1 diabetes progression in the first two years after onset from a single baseline blood draw taken 3–6 months post-diagnosis.
- Profile peripheral blood from 100 recently diagnosed people using DNA, RNA, protein and functional assays, including single-cell transcriptomes, to identify immunological and metabolic features linked to partial remission duration.
- Determine partial remission ('honeymoon period') duration from clinical data collected over 1.5–2 years and test whether immune features, not metabolic ones alone, associate with its length.
- Build predictive models with DIFAcTO — a machine learning pipeline combining univariate filtering, hierarchical clustering and LASSO regression — and test performance in an independent validation cohort matched for age, sex and progression rate.
More about the research
Despite more than thirty years of effort there is still no effective therapy, and one reason is that the disease moves at very different speeds in different people. Clinicians have no validated biological measures that reliably say who will progress quickly and who slowly. That gap makes clinical trials hard to design: if fast and slow progressors are mixed together, a drug's effect can be impossible to detect. Between 40 and 60 percent of patients go through a partial remission period, often called the honeymoon period, in the first six months after starting insulin, during which their own beta cells still work surprisingly well. It can last weeks or years, and what controls it is unclear. Once thought to be purely metabolic, it now appears the immune system is actively involved.
Why it matters
Type 1 diabetes raises illness and death rates and carries large social and economic costs. Biomarkers that predict fast versus slow progression from a single blood draw soon after diagnosis could let trials enroll better-matched participants and tell responders from non-responders, making it easier to recognize therapies that actually work. The same measures may also clarify how the immune system sustains or ends the honeymoon period.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Taylor Triolo
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Analyze whether baseline markers of beta cell function and stress predict C-peptide preservation during the partial remission, or "honeymoon," period in patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Mia Smith
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how insulin-binding BND2 B cells escape anergy, the normal switched-off state that prevents self-attack, and become activated in young-onset type 1 diabetes.
Randi Johnson
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Genetics
Build a high-resolution catalog of structural and functional variation in the MHC and KIR immune gene regions by targeted sequencing in more than 2,900 at-risk children, combined with existing array data and algorithms for NK cell and complement activation potential.
The school
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus: 41 labs on PI Pages, $766M a year on research, 205 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.