A new tool for the diabetes research community!

Update, June 26th: the preprint paper describing this tool is now out here.

We've been working for more than a year on this one, and finally it's out there! HumanIslets.com is a new website that's set to change how we study islets. Developed with grant support from CIHR, JDRF, and Diabetes Canada, this platform brings together a lot of important information about human pancreatic islets isolated by our program. These cells help our bodies manage blood sugar levels, which is crucial for people with diabetes and over many years our goal has been to help other researchers study and learn from human research islets.

Why It Matters for People with Diabetes
The more we understand about how islets work, the better we can treat and maybe even reverse diabetes. This website brings together some of the best in diabetes research (see our team here), allowing us to work together and share our findings, with each other and around the world. This kind of collaboration and openness can lead to breakthroughs that directly benefit patients by providing new ways to manage or treat diabetes. In short, all kinds of diabetes research can be helped by access to data, and HumanIslets.com is a major step in increasing data access and quality.

What is HumanIslets.com?
HumanIslets.com is a free online resource where scientists can explore and analyze a vast amount of data about human islets. Essentially, it is an atlas of information that we are making available to the world. The website currently has data from over 540 organ donors, some with diabetes and some without. This makes it an incredibly valuable tool for studying how islets work and how they are affected by (or contribute to the cause of) diabetes. Researchers can look at information from cells all the way up to data from entire donors.

Why is it Important for Researchers?
For researchers, HumanIslets.com is a treasure trove of information. It helps them understand how islets function in different people and what changes in these cells can lead to diabetes. The site is intended to help scientists answer research questions, and perhaps more importantly  to come up with new questions! One of the best things about HumanIslets.com is that it's designed to be easy to use, even if you're not a computer expert (there are lots of kinds of scientists out there - some experienced with big data analysis and computational biology, and others, like me, who are not!). The website is user-friendly, meaning you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to start exploring the data. This makes it accessible to a wide range of scientists, from students to medical professionals. For power users, the data can be downloaded directly!

Supporting Transparency and Collaboration
HumanIslets.com also emphasizes the importance of sharing data and making it easy to reproduce research results. This is important because it helps ensure that findings are reliable and can be built upon by other scientists. All the data and analysis methods are available for download, which means that anyone can check the work and even use the data for their own research!

I think this is an important new tool in the fight against diabetes. It offers a wealth of information and makes it easier for researchers to study islet cells. It represents a significant step forward in data quality and transparency, that I really hope will help ultimately to improve the lives of people with diabetes.

​Patrick