Diabetes, Metabolic and Endocrine Diseases

Prof. Shimon Efrat

Diabetes

Diabetes, resulting from loss or failure of insulinproducing pancreatic beta cells, afflicts about 400 million people. The optimal treatment, transplantation of functional cells, is severely limited by shortage of human organ donors Prof Efrat aims at developing an abundant source of human insulinproducing cells for betacell replacement therapy, by reprogramming human donor beta cells into pluripotent stem cells, which can be massively expanded in tissue culture, followed by differentiation.

Prof. Efrat chairs the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry at the School of Medicine and is the Nancy Gluck Regan Chair in Juvenile Diabetes. He received his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University, followed by postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He then joined the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine for a decade, where he is still a Visiting Professor, before moving to Tel Aviv University. He has seven patents, co-founded a company, and served on the scientific advisory boards of several companies.