A new $1 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust will get doctors and scientists at Benaroya Research Institute and Seattle Children’s Research Institute one step closer to better treatment for type 1 diabetes by studying the use of immunotherapy to treat the condition. 

Dr. Jane Buckner, President of Benaroya Research Institute, will be partnering with Dr. David Rawlings, Director of the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Chief of the Division of Immunology at Seattle Children’s Hospital, in this research effort. Buckner and her team have developed methods to pinpoint exactly which problematic T cells to target for editing. Once they have identified the T cells for this research, they will work with Rawlings and his team for the gene editing work and develop methods to efficiently manufacture regulatory T cells for immunotherapy clinical trials.

“This important collaboration with Seattle Children’s researchers allows us to combine our expertise to attack this complex problem,” Buckner said. “Our hope is that this research could lead to fundamentally new ways to prevent loss of immune system regulation, a common problem in autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes.”

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