Mark Atkinson

Mark Atkinson (born March 27, 1961) is an American medical researcher best known for his contributions to research seeking to predict, prevent, and cure type 1 diabetes.

He is the author of over 600 publications and is one of the world's most cited diabetes researchers.

Atkinson currently conducts research at the University of Florida College of Medicine, where he is Director for the Diabetes Institute at UF Health.

He also is the Executive Director of the Network for Pancreatic Organ donors with Diabetes (nPOD) program.

Atkinson has also been widely cited for his humanitarian contributions, particularly his efforts to improve diabetes care, management, and access to medications and supplies in developing nations.

Mark Atkinson was born and raised in southeastern Michigan.

He attended the University of Michigan – Dearborn where he received a bachelor of Science in microbiology in 1983.

Atkinson next received a Ph.D. from the Department of Pathology at the University of Florida in 1987.

While at the University of Florida, Atkinson’s interest in type 1 diabetes started by volunteering at a summer camp for children with the disease.

Those efforts led Atkinson to develop his three career goals of determining what causes type 1 diabetes, identifying a means to predict T1D, and developing a way to prevent and cure the disease.

Atkinson has been teaching and conducting research in the Departments of Pathology and Pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine since 1988.

He is the American Diabetes Association Eminent Scholar for Diabetes Research and the Jeffrey Keene Family Professor at the University of Florida, as well as the Director for the Diabetes Institute at that institution.

Atkinson is the Executive Director for the Network for Pancreatic Organ donors with Diabetes (nPOD) program, the world's largest "open access" biobank of human tissues from persons with or at varying levels of risk for type 1 diabetes.

nPOD is funded by JDRF and The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Through nPOD, Atkinson and other collaborators support research utilizing transplant-grade human tissues obtained from organ donors, including pancreas, spleen, whole blood, serum, lymph nodes, pancreatic lymph nodes, thymus, skin and bone marrow.

The goal is to better understand the causes of type 1 diabetes and identify potential approaches to curing the disease.

Atkinson has directed nPOD since its founding in 2007, it has and continued to support over 320 research projects in over 20 countries worldwide.[5]

Atkinson is the author of over 600 peer-reviewed publications as well as several book chapters.

Expertscape ranks Atkinson as one of the ten most published diabetes researchers in the world, and with an all time h-index of 91, he is one of the most highly cited diabetes researchers in the world.

Atkinson provides administrative or advisory service to JDRF, the American Diabetes Association, Diapedia, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Immunology of Diabetes Society.

He is a charter member of the NIH's Immune Tolerance Network Scientific Advisory Board, former Chair of the NIH's Human Islet Research Network (HIRN), and a steering committee member of NIH TrialNet.

Atkinson formerly served as an Associate Editor for the journal Diabetes.

He is ad hoc Editor-in-Chief for that journal as well as Diabetes Care.

Atkinson is pursuing a vaccine strategy for preventing type 1 diabetes.

The approach seeks to eliminate the autoimmune response directed at insulin that is present in patients with the disease by generating antigen-specific Tregs (regulatory T cells) in response to the antigens of interest rather than try to eliminate the autoreactive destructive cells.

To further this line of research, Atkinson and other investigators started a spin-off company called OneVax, LLC.

OneVax seeks to develop and commercialize a novel vaccine formula to prevent and/or reverse type 1 diabetes, incorporating biomaterials and polymers for applications including multicomponent and time-release drug delivery.

Atkinson serves as CEO of OneVax.

Atkinson's research activities have a broad scope, but most fall under the umbrella of preventing and curing type 1 diabetes.

Specific areas of focus include disease prediction, the role of environment in the initiation of type 1 diabetes, stem cells and beta cell regeneration, pancreatic pathology, clinical trials seeking to prevent or reverse type 1 diabetes, the identification of markers of immunological tolerance, and devising ways to instill proper immunoregulation.

Atkinson has been the recipient of funding awards from entities such as the National Institutes of Health, JDRF, the American Diabetes Association, and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Atkinson has conducted numerous studies that take different approaches to predicting, preventing, and curing type 1 diabetes.

His earliest efforts focused on the use of autoantibodies, both anti-insulin and anti-glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), for that purpose.

He was also amongst the first to describe cellular immune responses against GAD in both humans and the NOD mouse model of type 1 diabetes.

He has extensively utilized NOD mice as a means to identify agents that could be translated to studies seeking to prevent or reverse type 1 diabetes but at the same time, has stated that such efforts need be approached with caution.

His publication in the journal Nature Medicine noting the nearly 200 ways to prevent diabetes in that animal model elicited mixed responses from the research community.

Atkinson was one of the first to propose “combination therapies” to prevent or reverse the disease, as well as the repurposing of existing treatments and agents already approved for other diseases and conditions.

Atkinson has led or contributed to clinical trials utilizing several types of interventions to stop the progression of or reverse type 1 diabetes, including prophylactic insulin, GAD, cord blood, cord blood plus Omega-3 FA, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (GCSF), and anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG) plus GCSF.

For more than 25 years, Atkinson led an NIH funded clinical research program aiming to assess immune function during different stages of type 1 diabetes.

The goal is to learn more about the genetics and immune function of blood cells, diet, and viruses and how they relate to the progression of T1D.