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In part 7, the conclusion of this Exclusive Interview, Raghu Mirmira talks with Diabetes in Control Publisher Steve Freed about his personal motivations for getting involved in diabetes research.
Raghu G. Mirmira, PhD, MD is the director of pediatric research at Indiana University.
Transcript of this video segment:
Freed: How long have you been engaged in diabetes research and what motivated you to commit your career to researching the disease? Because what I find in dealing with people with diabetes, they are the most active people that either have it in your family, okay, and as a little kid, your goal is to cure diabetes, or you have it yourself. It’s amazing how many people involved in diabetes all walk around with insulin pumps. So, what was your reason for getting involved?
Mirmira: So, I got involved when I was a MD PhD student back in the mid 1980s. And I got into this profession, sort of the physician, scientist, profession because I wanted to be able to leverage my passion for research into addressing a disease. And you know with many people who might select diabetes as a researcher, oncology, or neuroscience, many people have a personal story to tell. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t have a personal story. I wasn’t personally afflicted by the disease or had a family member. But for me, it was actually my mentors. So, I came in, I worked in a lab to do my PhD research. And my mentor who has since passed away, Howard Tager, was a huge advocate for type 1 diabetes, was an advocate for the JDRF, the ADA, the NIH at the time. And I think what he instilled in me was that we were still in our infancy in understanding the disease and then treating the disease. In my lab, his goal was to identify new insulins that could behave differently and so that’s what I studied. I studied making different insulin analogues. And lo and behold, almost 30 years later and almost everybody who has type 1 diabetes is being treated with an insulin analogue. And so, what drove me in this direction was the understanding that I could make a big different in a disease and it wasn’t just spending three or four years doing it. It was a career and that was really why I became a physician scientist, because I knew that I wanted to do something where my research could have an impact in disease. So, for these 30 years I did graduate research, I trained ultimately as an endocrinologist, and then I got a job in academics doing basic research, studying diabetes. And as I mentioned I study both type 1 and type 2 because there’s a little bit of overlap in both diseases. Probably the majority of my work is in type 1 diabetes and I’m still very passionate about it.
Freed: Is there anything you can point to where it was that moment in time when you discovered something or a new fact?
Mirmira: So, there were probably a couple of those moments. But if you ask me for a single moment in time, I think it was when I was a graduate student and I think this is true for most people, their formative years are going to be so very critical in convincing them that this is what they want to do. If it didn’t succeed then, then you go down a different path. And for me, I was a chemist as a graduate student. I was creating insulins and then I was testing them in cell cultures. And then, what happened was just as I was nearing the end of my graduate training my mentor told me, “You know, you have to begin to apply everything that you do chemically to a living being.” And so, what we then did was we did studies where we took these analogues that we had hypothesized based on our work in vitro and actually moved them into animals, so we did work in rabbits. And the amazing thing for me as a young scientist was seeing that all of the chemistry that I did really resulted in the biology that we expected. And that was sort of a defining moment because I really saw that the process of translating ideas into biological systems was possible. And then, really my whole career was defined a process of translation, getting ideas not just from the test tube into animals but getting them from animals into humans. So, we’re doing quite a few human studies now. So, for me at least it’s that progression, that process, and that initial set of experiments where we actually moved from chemistry to biology was really quite a defining moment.