Right now, it's such an exciting time in diabetes research because we're on the cutting edge of these new technologies that have arisen. For example, you mentioned gene therapy, which is the ability to edit genes. This is now being done in cells and in mice, as you said, and in some instances, it is moving towards clinical trial, though not yet in diabetes, but for example, also in cell therapy, which I touched on briefly in my opening words.
However, there are still great gaps, in terms of applying these technologies to new therapies. Taking a step back, in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, we still have gaps in our basic understanding of the ideology of these diseases and what goes wrong with the immune system, for example. In the pancreas in type 1 diabetes, why does the immune system attack itself and destroy the insulin-producing beta cells?
As we move forward with these new technologies, I greatly believe that funding the whole gamut of research, from understanding mechanisms from genes and cells, right through to clinical trials—both of which government and the funding agencies, JDRF and Diabetes Canada, are funding—is critically important. To really develop new therapies, we still need to know what the molecular targets are in the cell. For that, there are still big gaps in our understanding, as we say, of the path of physiology of the disease.
My sense is that really funding the best research across that whole pathway, from genes and cells through the mouse models and through to clinical trials, is going to be critically important.