Paper with a detailed study of a someone developing type 2 diabetes using the latest…

Paper with a detailed study of a someone developing type 2 diabetes using the latest technologies. Pretty awesome way of using new technologies to gain insight in diseases on such a molecular level.

Reshared post from +MJ Clark

Our giant paper on whole personal omics profiling of an individual is published in Cell today!

This may be the first time anyone has ever fully witnessed the development (and staving off) of type II diabetes in a human being at this level. In addition, we fully witnessed and characterized a couple of infections over the course of the study.

Dr. Snyder, whom we sequenced, does not have type II diabetes in his family. However, whole genome sequencing revealed that he was predisposed to the disease. There were jokes around the lab about his eating habits–he'd show up to lab meeting with a cheeseburger and fries pretty much every week.

He was routinely getting his metabolites checked, including his glucose–much to our surprise–in the middle of this huge project to profile him we saw him begin to develop diabetes. His glucose became elevated, and stayed elevated. His blood RNA and protein profile changed. Perhaps more mysteriously, it happened immediately after a particularly nasty viral infection.

The implications here are pretty massive. Could an infection somehow kick off type II diabetes in an individual predisposed to the condition? It really seemed like that may have happened here.

What we do know for sure is that Dr. Snyder made some major life changes, in particular exercising more and eating more healthy foods, and after some time (a surprisingly long period of time), his blood glucose returned to normal levels and he is as healthy as ever.

Anyway, I hope this inspires you to read the paper. I think it's an amazing story, and it certainly has been a personal story not just for Dr. Snyder, but for the whole lab here at Stanford that contributed to the work.