The largest study of its kind into type 2 diabetes has produced the most detailed picture to date of the genetics underlying the condition.
Andrew Farmer, Professor of General Practice in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences is one of more than 300 scientists from 22 countries who collaborated on the study, which analysed the genomes of more than 120,000 people with ancestral origins in Europe, South and East Asia, the Americas and Africa.
The findings, published in Nature, identify several potential targets for new diabetes treatments, but also reveal the complexity of the disease that needs to be addressed by efforts to develop more personalised strategies for treatment and prevention.
Professor Farmer’s group, working with colleagues from the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, contributed data from 200 patients recruited from 12 Oxfordshire GP practices as part of a study looking at the prevalence of monogenic diabetes. The study, co-funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research, was published in 2011 in Diabetologia.
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The paper, The genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes, is published in Nature (doi:10.1038/nature18642).