Cellular Therapeutics Institute

As many as 29.1 million people in the United States have diabetes.* Of those, more than 8.1 million people may not even know they have the disease. The number is increasing every year, with approximately 28% of Americans projected to be diabetic by 2050.

A team of researchers at the Allegheny Health Network Institute of Cellular Therapeutics is working to reduce those numbers, as they conduct critical research with the hopes that their discoveries will lead to novel, safe, and effective medical breakthroughs.

The Institute, founded in 2014 and led by world-renowned physician-scientist Massimo Trucco, MD, was created as part of AHN's broad vision to be a regional and national leader in the field of personalized cellular therapies.

Today, the Institute pursues three major research arms:

• Technologies to prevent and treat the inflammation that underlies the clinical onset of type 1 and type 2 diabetes with the objective or preventing and reversing the disease.
• Cell and tissue engineering to reconfigure a patient’s immune system (white blood cells) so that it does not reject “self” and foreign transplants, including non-human tissues and organs.
• Clinical programs and trials aimed at facilitating the transplantation of insulin-producing cells as a more stable approach to restore normal blood sugar regulation following removal of the pancreas in chronic pancreatitis.

Based on, and leveraging its research discoveries, the institute is at the forefront of developing innovative therapies that are safe and adaptable to treat other disorders that share common threads inside the immune system.

* Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Diabetes Report Card, 2014.

To contact the institute:

Patrick M. Hnidka, Administrative Supervisor Institute of Cellular Therapeutics
Allegheny Health Network
320 East North Avenue 11th Floor, South Tower
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-4772
Phone: (412) 359-6988
E-mail: patrick.hnidka@ahn.org

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• Areas of Research
• Our Team