Welcome to the Chicago Project
Introduction
In the last 20 years, a vast amount of scientific knowledge has been gathered about how insulin-producing cells develop, function and survive in the normal human body and how they become compromised and destroyed in diabetic patients. In recent years, interest in diabetes has intensified because it is nearing epidemic proportions. In 1985 there were 30 million diabetics, and today that number has skyrocketed to more than 197 million. By 2025, diabetes is likely to affect 300 million people worldwide.
The need for a functional cure is critical, and the most promising treatment for controlling diabetes is to replace the destroyed insulin-producing cells with functional islet cells through transplantation that is immune to destruction.
To hasten this possibility, the Washington Square Health Foundation developed the idea of having researchers from three continents come together to form the Chicago Project, a group of highly qualified scientists and their teams who have committed themselves to achieving a functional cure for diabetes as soon as possible. This idea was presented to Dr. Jose Oberholzer.
As coordinator and director of cell transplantation at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, Oberholzer and the other Chicago Project leaders strongly believe that the scientific community now has all the necessary ingredients to make cell-based therapy an option for the majority of diabetic patients. Chicago Project team members are using a collaborative model to achieve a cure. By freely exchanging knowledge, team members have created a scientific alliance between institutions, a coalition that will provide for more direct and noncompetitive funding to accelerate finding a functional cure for diabetes.