Diabetes basic science research takes centre stage

Abstract

Diabetes basic science research takes centre stageDiabetic Medicine, the official journal of Diabetes UK, has a longstanding reputation for publishing high impact clinical papers but it was only this year, the centenary of the discovery of insulin, that it widened its remit to include non-clinical, basic science research. Diabetes UK provides funding to laboratories throughout the UK to support basic science projects, and presentations and posters from these studies are integral to the Diabetes UK annual professional conference programme.For this Basic Science Special Issue, we commissioned state-of-the-art reviews from diabetes researchers across the UK, covering topics all the way from genes to animal models. I am delighted that all invited authors have risen to this challenge to deliver lively and engaging reviews that I am confident will be the 'go to' papers that provide up to date authoritative overviews of a breadth of different research themes. We were also mindful that it is often group leaders who are invited to contribute so we specifically approached young investigators who had been nominated for the 2021 Diabetes UK Early Career Investigator Award: Neil Tanday 1 and Afi Leslie 2 have contributed high-quality papers indicating that our basic science post-docs have much to offer. Diabetes UK supports the most outstanding basic science diabetes researchers through the award of 5-year RD Lawrence Fellowships, which are named in recognition of Robin Lawrence, the founder of the British Diabetic Association (now Diabetes UK). Two of the current RD Lawrence Fellows (Anna Long 3 and Elisa de Franco 4 ) brought their specialist areas alive with up to date, focused reviews. Four established diabetes researchers (Susan Ozanne, 5 Aileen King, 6,7 Alison McNeilly 8 and Kathleen Gillespie 9 ) also accepted the challenge of writing stimulating review articles on a range of topics, and they were assisted in this by junior researchers in their groups. And finally, this year's recipient of the Diabetes UK Dorothy Hodgkin Lecture, Ewan Pearson, has contributed a thought-provoking review of his lecture entitled 'Drugs, genes and diabetes' , 10 which makes a strong case for identifying the effects of genetic variation on therapeutic responses to allow targeted clinical treatment for diabetes. I am sure that readers of this special issue will enjoy these accessible articles as much as I have and will use the information gained to inform their future research, their lectures and/or their general knowledge of diabetes research.And while we have focused on UK research in this special issue scientific research is, of course, an international endeavour and we are delighted that Diabetic Medicine is now receiving basic science manuscript submissions from around the world. We look forward to receiving your manuscripts at https://onlin elibr ary.wiley.com/page/journ al/14645 491/home p age/forau thors.html and as we expand the numbers of basic science articles published we hope that this will become the journal of choice for you ...