Schulze Diabetes Institute

The Schulze Diabetes Institute was founded in 1994 as the Diabetes Institute for Immunology and Transplantation, inside the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School. It took its present name in 2008 after Richard M. Schulze and the Schulze Family Foundation pledged 40 million dollars, the second largest gift in the university's history. Its executive director, Dr. Bernhard Hering, also directs islet transplantation there. Its investigators pioneered islet transplantation as a treatment aimed at reversing type 1 diabetes, using islets manufactured in the university's Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics facility. Its research reaches past human donors into pathogen-free porcine islets through the Spring Point Project, which Hering co-founded, and into stem-cell-derived islets and immune tolerance. The institute is also a referral center for total pancreatectomy with islet autotransplantation, which returns a patient's own insulin-producing cells after the pancreas is removed. That work treats severe chronic pancreatitis, so a substantial share of its clinical caseload is not type 1 diabetes.

Location

Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.