Parameswaran Ramakrishnan, assistant professor in the Department of Pathology, gave a special invited presentation in April at the 40th anniversary conference of the Mexican Society of Immunology in Zacatecas, Mexico.
Ramakrishnan was the only representative of CWRU in the meeting, which had approximately 800 participants.
He gave a talk titled “Transcriptional Regulation of T lymphocyte Function in Autoimmunity by O-GlcNAcylation.” In his talk, Ramakrishnan presented his lab’s finding on a novel molecular mechanism involved in autoimmune diabetes or type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is an incurable disease, and knowledge on molecular events involved in this diseases remains largely unknown. No therapeutics are available to treat type 1 diabetes, except insulin injection.
The health care cost of type 1 diabetes is about $15 billion. Ramakrishnan’s research has the potential to yield an oral therapeutic to ameliorate the complications of type 1 diabetes and significantly improve the life and treatment modalities of the disease.