Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the nPOD Annual Scientific Meeting and Clearwater, Florida! Each year, this meeting brings together the nPOD and broader type 1 diabetes research communities to share new discoveries, challenge existing ideas, build collaborations, and identify the questions that will move our field forward. The openness and collaborative spirit of this community have always made the nPOD meeting special, and we are delighted that you are joining us at the 2027 meeting, whether this is your first nPOD meeting or one of many.
This year’s meeting is especially meaningful as we celebrate Mark Atkinson’s retirement after 20 years as nPOD Executive Director and recognize his vision, leadership, and lasting contributions to nPOD’s collaborative culture and the type 1 diabetes research community. We are also excited to begin nPOD’s next chapter by welcoming Todd Brusko to the nPOD leadership team. Todd will join Alberto Pugliese and Carmella Evans-Molina as Co-Executive Directors, bringing his scientific expertise, longstanding commitment to nPOD, and deep understanding of the type 1 diabetes research community to this role. Together with the nPOD team, Scientific Advisory Board, investigators, and partners, we look forward to building on the strong foundation established over the past two decades while continuing to evolve nPOD to meet the changing opportunities and needs of the field.
Against this backdrop, our meeting theme, “nPOD at 20: What Have We Learned?”, invites us to reflect on two decades of progress in understanding the pathogenesis and natural history of type 1 diabetes. Throughout the meeting, we will revisit what was known when nPOD began in 2007, explore how studies of human pancreatic tissues have advanced and sometimes challenged established dogma, and consider the important questions that remain. As Mark concludes his leadership of nPOD, it seems especially fitting to reflect on how the study of human pancreatic tissues has challenged longstanding dogma and, in many ways, rewritten the textbook on type 1 diabetes. These discoveries have not only transformed what we know about the disease, but also fundamentally changed the questions we ask.
At the center of everything we do are the individuals who donated organs and tissues to nPOD and their families. Their extraordinary generosity makes this work possible. The discoveries presented at this meeting, and the hundreds of publications, datasets, collaborations, and new scientific directions generated through nPOD, are part of the legacy of those donors. We remain profoundly grateful to their families and committed to honoring their gifts by ensuring that these precious resources generate the greatest possible impact on our understanding and treatment of type 1 diabetes.
In closing, we are delighted to welcome you to Florida and hope you will take full advantage of the science, conversations, and opportunities to connect that make the nPOD meeting so special. We are deeply grateful to Breakthrough T1D and The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust for their generous support of nPOD and this meeting. Most of all, thank you for being part of the nPOD community. We look forward to a wonderful meeting together.
Alberto Pugliese, Todd Brusko, and Carmella Evans-Molina
Co-Executive Directors, nPOD
Mark Atkinson
Founding Executive Director, nPOD
Dear nPOD Annual Meeting Attendees:
Thank you for participating in the 18th Annual Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors with Diabetes (nPOD) Annual Scientific Meeting.
Breakthrough T1D (formerly JDRF) has a long history of bringing together investigators worldwide to share data and ideas and chart pathways to advances in type 1 diabetes (T1D) research and development. Your participation in events that foster T1D research holds the potential to benefit millions of people across the globe, and we are very grateful for all of your excellent work. Whether this is your first time at the nPOD Meeting or your 18th, you will find these days enlightening and meaningful as you continue our shared quest—a world without T1D.
As scientists, we look forward to your ideas and addressing the gaps where Breakthrough-T1D can invest in accelerating the field forward. We know that you will share some of the latest advances and research projects as we race for cures for T1D. nPOD has played such a pivotal role in our understanding of pathogenesis, providing unique resources and generating technologies to model human T1D, and supporting the development of new therapeutic approaches to cure T1D. We can’t wait to hear a summary of the meeting.
We wish you a stimulating, gratifying and successful conference. May it lead to innovative strategies, improved understanding, new collaborations and partnerships, and transformative research.
Thank you for supporting our mission.
Sincerely,
Dear nPOD community,
We are delighted to welcome you to the 17th Annual nPOD Scientific Meeting on behalf of The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
Our Type 1 Diabetes Program aims to support bold projects with the potential to change the trajectory of the disease — to prevent or delay its development and to support drug discovery for better treatment strategies. The millions of people living with type 1 diabetes around the world are always at the core of what we do. They are why we are proud to continue our support of the nPOD community, as we have over the past ten years.
This community is making great strides in building a better understanding of the disease. The collaborative structure of the nPOD network brings together highly dedicated researchers working on type 1 diabetes. We witness this through our support for the George S. Eisenbarth nPOD Award for Team Science, which has encouraged excellent collaborative research. Additionally, new ideas are at the heart of innovation, which is why we provide seed funding for over 20 individual investigators asking cutting edge questions using nPOD samples.
We have seen incredible progress emanate from nPOD over the years, but many unanswered questions remain. The answers lie within the unique and precious samples available through nPOD, the dedication of the researchers in the network, and the new framework provided by nPOD’s Key Questions.
We wish you a productive and successful meeting that energizes and inspires your efforts to discover ways to ease, or even remove, the burden of type 1 diabetes. We look forward to connecting with you this year and learning about the latest advances in the community.
Warmest regards,
Gina Agiostratidou, PhD, MBA Maryaline Coffre, PhD
Program Director Program Officer
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust