My name is Barb Nikolajczyk.
I'm in the College of Medicine, and my research focuses on
inflammation and obesity and type 2 diabetes.
So, my dad had type 2 diabetes, and I think it could be argued that he died from that
disease and complications of that disease.
So I was certainly aware of the devastation of the disease.
I was sort of a hardcore molecular immunologist when I was a postdoc, and I took that into
my first faculty position.
And at that point in time, it was in the mid 2000s, it was really clear that there was
very little known about inflammation and type 2 diabetes.
And even simple things like, how does somebody with type 2 diabetes respond to a vaccine?
How is it that they are less able to kick off a tuberculosis bug
than a person without type 2 diabetes?
Those kinds of questions really seemed a natural fit with my own
personal experience with my dad.
And it was a wide open field.
There was really no field when I started looking at the human subject samples
of people with type 2 diabetes.
I was at Boston University previously … I was looking for jobs, and I met one of my
now colleagues at a conference.
And he convinced me to come to Kentucky, which was not really even on my radar.
But when I came here, it was really easy to fall in love with the place.
The clinical research group here is really extraordinarily strong.
So there really was no second choice in terms of looking for places to relocate.
Why is it you have all these mouse studies that show that inflammation is important for
transitioning animals from obese and metabolically health to obese and insulin-resistant?
But if you look at clinical trials with anti-inflammatories and type 2 diabetes,
they really are relatively disappointing.
So, what we decided to do is to kind of leverage some of the immunology expertise that I had
developed over the years into really redefining inflammation and the disease, trying to start
all over again to see if we could identify checkpoints in that process.
And what we actually secured funding for from the NIH and a project that we were really
were only able to kick off once we came to UK, was to do a longitudinal analysis.
So, you could start with people who are relatively metabolically healthy and follow them as they
naturally progressed to type 2 diabetes, with no clinical intervention whatsoever.
Looking at their inflammatory profiles to see if we can identify potential drug targets
along that trajectory.
Starting at the bedside and going back to the bench, tweaking your concepts and then
moving back to the bedside before just launching into clinical trials, I think it will be more
productive, hopefully.
If we could sort of increase the hit rate on successful clinical trials, I mean, that
would be a huge boon to the biomedical research.
So, my title is Associate Director for Translational Research in Diabetes.
Which is a big mouthful.
They brought me in to kind of help with the translational part.
Hence the title.
Because there aren't a lot of people who are sort of in that middle ground.
There are actually a lot of great basic scientists, but really kind of bridging that and translating
that, it turns out, is not just unusual here, it's sort of, nationally unusual for people
to be in the space.
So I felt like this was sort of fertile ground for me to try to reach people on sort of both
sides of that gulf.
I'm really interested in partnering with the WHY registry, 17,000 participants.
And Barnstable Brown is interested in some of those participants that have diabetes,
both type 1 and type 2, also trying to encourage people from the clinic to get into that registry.
So, I think it's a win-win for WHY and Barnstable Brown, because it will just increase the number
of participants, not only for research studies, but also for disseminating information on,
you know, personal care, community resources available for diabetes, those kinds of things.
Which Barnstable Brown is really good at already.
I feel like every single person here, including you, is sort of on the same team,
with the same goals.
When I have a success in something, I feel like they feel that as their success as well,
instead of them, just doing their job and going home. Right?
I feel like they're really invested in the entire institution.
And it really just changes the whole flavor of things.
It's a cultural thing.