SRP Diabetes Retreat

Recap of 12th Retreat

TIME: May 15-16, 2023

VENUE: Djurönäset Conference Center, in the archipelago just outside Stockholm. 

UPDATED May 14 PROGRAM AND ABSTRACTS: PROGRAM BOOK DOWNLOAD

This year we were very happy having an all-time high: 175 registrations, 82 abstracts, 21 talks and 64 posters. Please download the program and abstract book for all info.

External speakers:

TYPE 1 DIABETES, CLINICAL DIABETOLOGY

Chantal Mathieu, KU Leuven, Belgium

GLUCAGON SECRETING ALFA CELLS

Jakob Grunnet Knudsen, U Copenhagen, Denmark

CARDIOVASCULAR COMPLICATIONS IN DIABETES

Ann Marie Schmidt, New York U

OBESITY AND TYPE 2 DIABETES

Tore Bengtsson, Stockholm U

METABOLOMICS, MUSCLE, CIRCADIAN PHYSIOLOGY

Ken Dyar, Helmholtz Munich, Germany

PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Elin Chorell, Thomas Ebert, Scott Frendo-Cumbo, Noah Moruzzi, Stefan Nobel, Ulrika Widegren, Anna Witasp, Shane Wright and Zhichao Zhou.

Recap from the 11th retreat 2022

This year we arranged a 1-day meeting on May 30 at the venue Scandic Foresta Hotel in Lidingö.

We had a keynote by our own Peter Arner, Karolinska Institutet, who in his talk “Adipose tissue for better or worse” gave us a fantastic overview of his and others contributions over 50 years in the field of adipose biology! 

We also would like to thank our two external guest speakers for joining us with great talks “Epigenetics, type 2 diabetes and precision medicine" by Charlotte Ling from Lund University and “Metabolism of apoB-containing lipoproteins and their role in atherogenesis” by Jan Borén from University of Gothenburg.

We congratulate all short talk contestants for outstanding talks and especially Scott Frendo-Cumbo for being awarded this year’s best short talk award for “The insulin induced transcriptional network in human adipocytes contains multiple insulin signaling negative feedback loops”.

This year it was hard to distinguish between the categories on preliminary study and completed study why two posters were awarded in the same category “Most promising project”: Jutta Jalkanen with her poster entitled “Resolving adipose tissue microarchitecture using single cell and spatial transcriptomics” and Haojiang Lu with her poster “Developmental programming by maternal androgen excess is mediated by androgen receptor pathways”

Recap from the 10-year anniversary retreat 2021

At Vår Gård in November 2021 we were finally able to celebrate our 10-year anniversary! This retreat has become such an appreciated event over the last 10 years, and it was great to meet again F2F after the pandemic meeting restrictions.

We had excellent external talks: “Metabolic Diseases – Solutions from Cells to Society” by John Kirwan, “Primary prevention of type 1 diabetes: challenges and hopes" by Mikael Knip, “Human islet microRNAs and their role in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes.” by Lena Eliasson, “Targeting brain circuits to improve obesity and type 2 diabetes” by Lora Heisler and “An Immune-Metabolic Interface” by Anthony Ferrante. We also had an interesting non-scientific talk by Isabella Samuelsson (editor from Nature Metabolism) “Careers in scientific publishing”.

Among the internal talks there were also many high-quality presentations. Valerio Azzimato and Angelo Ascani shared the best short talk award (for postdocs and PhD students) as voted by the participants:  Valerio Azzimato “Hepatic miR-144 drives fumarase activity preventing NRF2 activation during obesity” and Angelo Ascani “The role of B cells in immune cell activation in Polycystic Ovary Syndrome”. Aida Collado was awarded best poster for completed work for her poster entitled "Downregulation of erythrocyte miR-210 in diabetes induces endothelial dysfunction by targeting vascular PTP1B”. Logan Pendergrast was awarded best poster for most promising project for his poster entitled “Time-of-day influences post-exercise metabolism in mouse adipose tissue”

A recap from the 2019 retreat

May 9-10, 

Place: Vår Gård, Saltsjöbaden, approximately 30 min outside Stockholm

Program: external speakers below + selected from abstracts

ISLETS

Michele Solimena, TU Dresden

MUSCLE

Amira Klip, Univ Toronto

ADIPOSE TISSUE

Mike Czech, UMass (US)

Dominique Langin, INSERM

HUMAN ENERGY EXPENDITURE AND DIABETES

Eric Ravussin, Pennington Biomedical Center

A recap of the retreat 2018

On May 17-18 our 8th retreat took place at Vår Gård conference center. 

We would like to thank all our external guest speakers for their time and effort joining us with their excellent talks “LepRb Signaling and the Regulation of Transcription” by Martin Myers (U Michigan) “Sympathetic Neuroimmunity for Obesity” by Ana Domingos (Gulbenkian Institute) “A long-term strategy for the treatment, modification and prevention of type 2 diabetes and related conditions” by James Johnson (U British Columbia), “Gut microbiota and metabolic health: hype or hope?” by Ellen Blaak (U Maastricht) and “Non Alcoholic fatty liver disease: from molecular genetics to precision medicine” by Stefano Romeo (U Gothenburg).

Internal talks are the basis for the meeting and we were glad that so many who were offered talks also accepted and made efforts to deliver high quality presentations. Of the many interesting junior talks (by postdocs or PhD students) we want to again congratulate Qian Li to the best short talk award decided by the online voting system at the retreat:  Qian Li “Human adipocytes endoreduplicate”. 

We congratulate the following two on their poster awards for PhD students and Postdocs: Pim van Krieken was awarded best poster for completed work for his poster entitled “Beta cell specific synthetic expression methodology for regulating islet graft function in vivo” and Natalie Stiglund was awarded best poster for most promising project for her poster entitled “Characterization of liver and adipose tissue natural killer cells in patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis”

A recap from the 2017 retreat

May 4-5, 2017 the 7th retreat was organized, again at the conference center “Vår Gård”, just outside Stockholm with 185 participants, 17 internal presentations and more than 50 science posters! Plus several posters presenting research groups and infrastructures! This event was sponsored also by the doctoral programme in metabolism and endocrinology (MetEndo), and featured internationally recognized external speakers such as Mark H Ellisman (UCSD), Ruth Loos (Mount Sinai), Steven R Smith (Florida) and Olle Melander (Lund University) with great talks covering advanced microscopy, human genetics on obesity, epigenetic regulation of adipose tissue and novel insights on endocrine disturbances in diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We celebrated Professor Emeritus John Wahren (KI) for his 80th birthday who gave an outstanding keynote lecture on “Metabolic Studies in Humans: Usefulness of the A-V Balance Technique”. Highly appreciated were also the talks by our junior researchers! For a review, see the retreat program for 2017 here.

A recap from the 2016 retreat

Our last retreat was at May 12-13 - and is by now a well-established forum at KI - the 6th retreat of SRP Diabetes together with the EndoMet (Endocrinology and Metabolism) research network at KI! We are very glad that the meeting had an all-time high with 170 registered participants and perhaps was the best retreat so far, judging from the scores in the feedback survey! The venue was this time “Vår Gård” in Saltsjöbaden just outside Stockholm, a place that most people liked very much, conveniently reached by the local train just 30 mins from the city center. Six external speakers – Emilio Hirsch (Italy), Ulf Ahlgren (Umeå), Tina Vilsbøll (Denmark), Mattias H Tschöp (Germany), Matthias Blüher (Germany) and Sander Kersten (Netherlands) gave very interesting lectures on cell signaling in growth, pancreas 3D imaging, gut hormones, novel chimeric hormones as diabetes treatments, obesity and lipid metabolism. Many interesting internal talks were also given, see the Retreat program for 2016.

This year the”Best short talk award” was given by the audience to Olof Lagerlöf for “The nutrient sensor OGT in PVN neurons regulates feeding”, best poster for completed work was awarded to Rongrong Fan for "Loss of corepressor GPS2 sensitizes macrophage activation upon metabolic stress in obesity
and type-2 diabetes" and best poster for most promising project to Jennifer Jager for "Contribution of non-coding RNAs expressed by Kupffer cells in insulin resistance".

A recap from the 2015 retreat

On May 21-22 the retreat took place at Djurönäset, bit further out in the Stockholm Archipelago. A good number of the KI research community in diabetes and metabolism turned up and interacted with as many as 9 external speakers; Zach Gerhart-Hines (Denmark), Riita Lahesmaa (Finland), Olle Korsgren (Uppsala), Iris Shai (Israel), Ulf Riserus (Uppsala), Paul Njolstad (Norway), Anders Rosengren (Lund), Christian Benedict (Uppsala) and Suzanne Dickson (Göteborg) who presented on topics like circadian rhythm, type 1 diabetes, human genetics in diabetes and CNS regulation of metabolism. There were also several excellent talks by internal speakers, see the program for 2015.

Leandro Agudelo once again got the most votes for best short talk “Kynurenic Acid activates a beige fat program and increases
systemic energy expenditure”; while Thais de Castro Barbosa was awarded best poster for completed work "Paternal chronic high-fat diet consumption reprograms the gametic epigenome and induces transgenerational inheritance of metabolic disorder" and Amanda Klein was awarded best poster for most promising work "PGC-1α1 activators: Towards a new generation of drugs for metabolic disease"

The interactions included socializing at the dance floor helped by a live band as well as contemplating on new insights at the beautiful archipelago sunset.

A recap from the 2014 Retreat

Thank you to all of the participants in this years SRP Diabetes – EndoMet retreat! Your contributions that made this a very successful and inspiring meeting.

In particular, we would like to thank all of the speakers for their time and for sharing their research. We were also very pleased that so many people presented posters and we appreciate their effort. Judging by the crowd and discussions by the posters it went very well (in fact it was hard to make people leave the posters for the dinner!)

We would like to congratulate the following people again on their awards:

Teresa Daraio and Ismael Valladolid-Acebes were awarded for best poster for completed work for their poster entitled ”Insulin resistance and impaired rotarod performance in SNAP-25b deficient mice”

Karin Åvall was awarded for best poster for most promising project for her poster entitled “Decreasing apolipoprotein CIII reduces the harmful effects of high fat diet!”

Leandro Agudelo was awarded the best short talk award with 31 % of the votes for his talk “Skeletal Muscle PGC-1α1and Stress-induced Depression”

Thais de Castro Barbosa came in second place with 17% of the votes for her talk “Identification of epigenetic carriers for paternal inheritance of metabolic disorders in rats”

Ismael Valladolid-Acebes came in third place with 15% of the votes for his talk “SNAP-25b deficiency increase the vulnerability to diabesity and mood disorders

We greatly appreciate the feedback we received, which is crucial for us to improve the retreat. Overall everyone seemed very satisfied, but we will definitely consider your grades, your many comments and ideas when planning next year’s retreat.

Program from the SRP Diabetes-ENDOMET Retreat 2014

A recap from the 2013 Retreat

Retreat in 2013 witnessed an all time high with 165 people registered and around 150 participants! We are grateful to all participants who made this to a very enjoyable and stimulating event. We especially want to thank all the speakers within the program and externally from KI, and for those travelling from other cities coming from Umeå University, Uppsala University and Gothenburg University. We also appreciate all people presenting posters.

We want to highlight some of the excellent work (both science and ability to present) by our younger colleagues for which three awards were given out at the retreat; Joanna Hård in the category best poster for finished project: ”Bone Marrow Contribution to Human Adipogenesis”; Carole Muller in the category best poster for unfinished project: ”The non-hematopoietic erythropoietin analogue, ARA290, improves glucose tolerance by stimulating insulin secretion in spontaneously type2 diabetic Goto-Kakizaki rats.” and Jorge Correia for best short talk presentation “Role of FXR isoforms in hepatic glucose and lipid metabolism”.

The received feedback is great help for us and which revealed that the participants were overall very satisfied. Some comments were brought up such as improvement of the poster session (largest so far for our retreats) and some of the speaker formats which we certainly will consider for the retreat in 2014.

Program and registration for SRP Diabetes-ENDOMET Retreat 2013