Dr. Moo-Yeal Lee (Co-PI) at Cleveland State University, Dr. Eben Alsberg (Co-I) at Case Western Reserve University and Drs. James Wells (Contact PI) and Takanori Takebe (Co-I) at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have received a multi-institutional grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH). The team's research is titled "Modeling diabetes using an integrated plate system" has been funded through 2020 with a contingency of an additional three years upon successful completion of the UG3 project.

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) have funded $1.69 million to the research project for modeling type II diabetes.

The team of researchers has proposed to develop an integrated plate system consisting of a 256-pillar plate with sidewalls and slits (256PillarPlate) and a complementary 256-well plate with perfusion channels (256PerfusionPlate) within the footprint of 384-well plates.

Our goal is to develop a high-throughput, integrated plate system containing human pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-derived liver, pancreas, and intestine organoids to simulate normal/diseased mechanisms involved in inter-organ crosstalk and investigate how hormones, nutrients, and drugs might mediate the reversal of type II diabetes.