Precision nutrition
12 September 2024
Associate Professor Jordi Merino awarded EFSD/NNF Future Leaders Award
Award
The DKK 5 million award will support Associate Professor Jordi Merino’s research into developing personalized strategies for diagnosing and treating type 2 diabetes.
One in ten people around the world now live with type 2 diabetes (T2D), which means they struggle to regulate their blood sugar levels. The disease develops in a variety of ways, which means that no single approach works on everyone. CBMR Associate Professor Jordi Merino hopes to develop personalized treatment approaches, and has now received a DKK 5 million EFSD/NNF Future Leaders Award to support his research.
“For the past ten years, my research has focused on understanding the factors that cause blood sugar levels to worsen, aiming to improve personalized diabetes treatment. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the very early stages of the disease. I believe this is because standard medical tests can’t detect early changes in blood sugar levels,” explains Jordi Merino.
In the project REMEDY-T2D, Jordi Merino will use advanced continuous glucose monitoring and metabolic data from a large group of non-diabetic people to map out early blood sugar changes. By combining this data with genetic studies and single-cell genomics, his aim is to identify the genes and mechanisms involved in these early changes. Finally, he will study how people with different early blood sugar change profiles respond to T2D prevention efforts and their progression to T2D.
“My main idea is that these early changes are crucial and have important implications. This comprehensive research program could create a new way of understanding the early stages of type 2 diabetes, ultimately helping to develop better strategies to fight this growing global problem.”
The Merino Group is currently recruiting a Postdoc in data science, epidemiology, bioinformatics, and genomics to support this work. Read more here.
About the EFSD/Novo Nordisk Foundation Future Leaders Award
The EFSD/Novo Nordisk Foundation Future Leaders Award is awarded to candidates who are promising and have a track record of excellence and clear commitment to their chosen area of diabetes research.
The Programme comprises four Awards annually. Each Award comprises up to DKK 5 million over 5 years to support the recipients’ research activities, such as project costs and salaries. The total annual grant amount is up to DKK 20 million.
Successful candidates will have received their highest academic degree (PhD or MD) no more than 10 years before the Award period starts but do not yet hold a tenured academic faculty appointment when the Award period starts. For clinicians holding more than one qualifying degree (such as MD and PhD) or with a clinical specialist degree or board certification, the time elapsed since obtaining the first degree may not exceed 12 years before the Award period starts. Recipients must work in a university or hospital or another not-for-profit research institution in Europe throughout the Award period and must be members of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD).
The Programme is a collaboration between the European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes (EFSD) and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. A Review Committee appointed by the EFSD decides the recipients of the Award based on the applications, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation donates the money accompanying the Award.