DCOE Co-Director Mark Atkinson receives ADA Outstanding Scientific
Achievement Award

RELEASE DATE: Jun. 3, 2004

University of Florida scientist Mark Atkinson, Ph.D., has logged half a million miles on Delta Airlines. That’s a lot of peanuts.

Some weeks the diabetes researcher spends more time in the air than in his own laboratory at the UF Health Science Center. On a recent flight he sped over the Atlantic, touching down in the United Kingdom for a scientific meeting in Cambridge, England. Then it was back to Gainesville for a day before racing down the runway yet again, this time stopping in Hershey, Pa., and New York City.

Although his rigorous travel schedule takes him physically out of the lab, he admits the chance to reflect is not without its advantages. Once the jet reaches cruising altitude, Atkinson, a pathologist by training, rarely tilts his seat back for a snooze. Instead, he sifts through piles of scientific articles or powers up his tray-sized laptop computer and gets to work.

All those efforts have translated into some key findings that are changing the field and quite possibly the future of patient care. And this month they’re earning Atkinson two of the world’s top honors for diabetes research.

“Dr. Atkinson is one of the rare individuals who sees the big picture, from genetics and DNA to bench-side and clinical application,” according to a statement from the American Diabetes Association, which selected him to receive its 2004 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award, sponsored by Eli Lilly and Co. “He has helped the cause of diabetes at many levels, working with equal passion in research, patient advocacy and in raising diabetes awareness.”

The honor, to be presented at the ADA’s annual meeting Saturday [June 5] in Orlando, is given to a scientist who has conducted outstanding research in diabetes and who embodies creativity of thought. Atkinson received a medal and $5,000, and delivered the Lilly Lecture — “30 Years of Understanding the Autoimmune Basis for Type 1 Diabetes: Why Can’t We Prevent This Disease?” — before more than 10,000 of the meeting’s attendees.

Atkinson will then travel to Washington, D.C., to receive the Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine, M.D., Excellence in Clinical Research Award on June 10, given by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International for contributions to the clinical translation of diabetes research.

“We’ve been trying to identify Ph.D. investigators who epitomize the translation of research to the bedside, and Mark exemplifies this beautifully; he is highly deserving of this award,” said physician Richard Insel, the JDRF’s executive vice president of research. “Mark has that unique ability to immediately think about the translation of basic science research and he keeps his eyes on the big picture. I think he exemplifies exactly what you’d want to see in a Ph.D. who is conducting biomedical research. He goes beyond the day-to-day basic science results and thinks about the clinical applications. He’s always focused on how he can apply his biomedical research to the bedside.”

When Atkinson began his career 17 years ago, the study of diabetes immunology was still in its infancy. Fresh out of a graduate program in pathology at UF’s College of Medicine, he was among the first to show that administering insulin to mice genetically destined to develop diabetes could thwart the errant immune system’s battle to destroy insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. His published findings helped pave the way for the massive National Institutes of Health Diabetes Prevention Trial, which tested the approach in humans.

He also was one of the earliest investigators of glutamic acid decarboxylase, or GAD, an enzyme generated by the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas. Patients with type 1 diabetes often develop autoantibodies to GAD as the immune system turns against the body’s islet cells. Atkinson then helped develop a standardized way to use the presence of these GAD autoantibodies to predict diabetes. According to the ADA, the UF group is recognized as one of the major centers in screening for type 1 diabetes susceptibility in the world.

GAD has since been licensed to a company that is developing an experimental drug designed to inhibit progression of type 1 diabetes in people. It’s currently undergoing testing, but studies to date show the drug appears to improve insulin production.

Atkinson, now the Sebastian family eminent scholar in UF’s department of pathology, immunology and laboratory medicine, has spent most of the past two decades building an internationally regarded research program on the immunology of type 1 diabetes. He and his colleagues have extensively studied how to prevent and predict type 1 diabetes. They scrutinized the genetics of the disease. They launched newborn screening programs so treatment could be initiated earlier.

Then, about four years ago, they shifted focus, greatly expanding their research emphasis, buoyed in part by a $10.4 million grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International to establish the JDRF Gene Therapy Center for the Prevention of Diabetes and Its Complications at the University of Florida and the University of Miami.

UF scientists affiliated with the center, which Atkinson directs, have been studying gene therapy’s potential to deliver medicine in novel ways. They also are seeking to engineer rejection-proof tissues for islet and kidney transplant and expand existing efforts aimed at tackling diabetes-associated complications such as vision loss. Meanwhile, as obesity and diabetes near epidemic levels, Atkinson also is studying the role the weight-regulating hormone leptin may play in the development of diabetes.

Atkinson has contributed numerous research papers to the scientific literature and was the fifth most-cited author in the field of type 1 and type 2 diabetes between 1990 and 2001, according to the publisher Thompson ISI. He has been praised for bridging his research interests with a commitment to directly serve patients and their families through advocacy and awareness-raising efforts. He continues to serve in key national leadership positions and is currently chairman of the JDRF’s Medical Science Review Committee and a member of the National Institutes of Health Immune Tolerance Network.