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For Health Professionals

This section is intended for health professionals and is only available in English

For decades, in the Øresund region there have been strong and internationally recognized competencies within screening, genetics and immunology in type 1 diabetes (T1D). In 2018, an initiative was taken to establish a formal collaboration between researchers at Lund University Clinical Research Center Malmø and Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen and in 2020 DiaUnion was created based on initial support from Region Skåne, Region Hovedstaden, the Novo Nordisk Foundation and EU-Interreg ÖKS.

Vision and Goals

The vision of DiaUnion is to prevent and ultimately cure type 1 diabetes (T1D). Preventing T1D requires early detection of people in the pre-symptomatic stages, and a global lack of screening programs for T1D constitutes a major bottleneck for early detection and clinical trials of new therapies. With several novel preventive drugs in the medicine developers’ pipeline, the goal of DiaUnion is to develop a cost-effective early detection program that can be adopted by the regional public health systems.

Timeline

Methods

DiaUnion takes a novel approach to early detection of type 1 diabetes (T1D) by including two related autoimmune diseases, celiac disease (CD) and autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD). The three diseases are all linked to the HLA-DR and DQ risk haplotype, leading to overlap in the clinical phenotypes of the diseases as shown in the figure below. CD affects 10% and AITD up to 30% of all children with T1D.

The underlying link between T1D and CD and AITD holds a significant, and only to a lesser extent cultivated, potential for early detection in the presymptomatic stages and development of preventive therapies, and in DiaUnion we seek to utilize and optimize this potential:

  • Using novel Antibody Detection by Agglutination-PCR (ADAP) multiplex assays, autoantibody screening for the three diseases can be done in one go, which saves time, cost and human resources. Combining multiplex assays with lab automation, such as the DiaUnion Hamilton Microlab liquid handling robot (see picture below), analyses that earlier took a week to complete, can be done in one day. In addition, screening for all three diseases can be done at basically the same cost as for screening for T1D alone.
  • In some countries, ethical approval for genetic and autoantibody screening for diseases that cannot be cured can be challenging. However, the sum of benefits of available preventive measures for three diseases, instead of just one, forms a stronger argument for ethical approvals.
  • The health economic case for adopting screening as part of a public health service is strengthened considerably when screening for three diseases compared to only one.
  • Due to the genetic link between the three diseases, a primary prevention therapy may be able to cover all three diseases, and approaches to secondary/tertiary therapies may be similar. Thus, collaboration and exchange of knowledge between researchers in each disease are important.

The core focus of DiaUnion is on T1D, thus the follow-up and monitoring activities involving CD and AITD will be handled by partner specialists in these disease areas.

The picture below shows co-PI Åke Lernmark next to the DiaUnion Hamilton Microlab liquid handling robot.

Statistics

DiaUnion statistics will be published here.

Publications

DiaUnion publications will be listed here.