Helmsley Charitable Trust Awards $52 Million to Support the Global Platform for the Prevention of Autoimmune Diabetes
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust today announced five new grants that will support the European, multinational Global Platform for the Prevention of Autoimmune Diabetes (GPPAD; “gee-pad”) and its first trial – the Primary Oral Insulin Trial (POInT). Leading GPPAD will be Professor Dr. Anette Ziegler, Director of the Institute of Diabetes Research, Helmholtz Zentrum München and Technical University München.
Launched in 2015, the Helmsley Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Prevention Initiative aims to support the discovery and development of interventions to prevent the disease. The GPPAD network is designed to advance the goals of the T1D Prevention Initiative by identifying newborns with a high genetic risk of developing T1D autoimmunity and conducting primary prevention clinical trials. Primary prevention aims to prevent the onset of autoimmunity associated with T1D.
Helmsley’s investment of over $52 million in grants has been awarded to the Helmholtz Zentrum München with its partners, including the Technical University München, Lund University, the University of Oxford, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Technische Universität Dresden, Hannoversche Kinderheilanstalt, Instytut Matki i Dziecka, and Warszawski Uniwersytet Medyczny.
In addition to supporting the existing GPPAD network already in place in Germany, Helmsley grants will fund expansion in Germany and start-up activities in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Poland to begin genetic testing of newborns. The participating institutions will identify infants with a significant genetic risk for type 1 diabetes to begin recruiting for POInT, a randomized controlled phase IIb trial to determine if daily administration of high-dose oral insulin in early life can prevent T1D-associated autoimmunity. To fully enroll POInT, over 300,000 newborns will be tested across all participating institutions. The study is also expected to provide a bioresource to share with scientists who study the causes of early autoimmunity and type 1 diabetes.
GPPAD, expected to be a major advancement in the field of T1D, provides a multicenter platform for both large and small T1D primary prevention trials and for investigating the immune system in a crucial period before autoimmunity starts. In the long term, it is hoped that the current work will lay the foundation for potential expansion to other childhood diseases, with an overarching goal of promoting health in early life...