Niina Sandholm

Over 500 million people worldwide have diabetes. Diabetic complications such as diabetic kidney disease, eye disease, and cardiovascular diseases affect every second of the patients. Even though these complications pose a massive burden both for the individual and for society, the current treatment can only slow down the progression of these complications rather than curing them. In this project we search for genetic and epigenetic factors predisposing to diabetic complications, as well as for serum proteins that could serve as biomarkers, i.e., predict onset of the complications in order to identify the individuals at risk. Furthermore, combining the genetic, epigenetic, and proteomic data with the health registries and disease outcomes will help us understand the disease processes from genetics to epigenetics to proteomics to the disease.