• Prof Ewan Pearson

CV

Ewan Pearson is Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the University of Dundee, Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee. He is an associate director of the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre, where he leads the Diabetes Data Catalyst. Ewan has been awarded the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Croom Lecture, the Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Lecture and Dorothy Hodgkin Lecture, and the EASD Minkowski Award. He was recently elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Ewan’s research interests have been in the phenotypic and genotypic determinants of drug response in diabetes, and in stratified approaches to the management of diabetes. Ewan’s earlier work established that patients with monogenic diabetes did not need insulin treatment (Lancet 2003, NEJM 2006), paving the way for 1000s of patients to transition off long term insulin treatment onto oral medication. Ewan was awarded £2.8M from the Chief Scientists Office to implement precision diabetes care within NHS Tayside.

ABSTRACT

Genetics and Precision Medicine in Diabetes Care

People are all different, and this is no different when we consider people with diabetes, yet the current approaches to management of diabetes tend to treat everyone the same. The field of precision medicine aims to recognise these differences – whether at the level of their phenotype or at the molecular level. Faced with multiple, and increasing, treatment options for diabetes as well as increasing healthcare costs there is a clear need to target therapy to maximise benefit and reduce harm for every patient with diabetes.

This talk will discuss advances in precision medicine and pharmacogenetics in diabetes. I will highlight recent work on how phenotypic variation matters, and how this maps to genetic variation, and will provide an overview of how genetic variants alter glycaemic response to commonly used diabetes drugs and how these inform on disease and drug mechanism. I will finish with an overview of iDiabetes – an intelligent diabetes platform that we will be using to implement precision diabetes care in Tayside in 2024.