Alberto Pugliese MD

Dr. Alberto Pugliese is a Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine. He is the Head of the Immunogenetics Program at the Diabetes Research Institute. Dr. Pugliese is a diabetes investigator studying the causes, prevention and cure of type 1 diabetes. He is a Steering Committee member of the National Institutes of Health Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, a NIH-sponsored consortium that designs and implements clinical trials for type 1 diabetes, as well as a Core member of its Biomarker Mechanistic Panel. He is Executive Co-Director of the JDRF Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donors (nPOD), a large collaborative effort aiming at better studying the diabetes autoimmune process and regeneration in the human pancreas.

Dr. Pugliese also leads several research projects at the University of Miami: 1) studies on diabetes recurrence in pancreas transplant recipients (with Dr. George Burke); 2) studies of IL-2 as a novel treatment for islet autoimmunity in type 1 diabetes (with Drs. Tom Malek and Jay Skyler); 3) studies to identifying novel microRNA biomarkers for prediction of type 1 diabetes. Dr. Pugliese's research interest also include the genetic and cellular mechanisms of immunological self-tolerance, the lack of which results in autoimmunity and diabetes. Insulin is a critical target of the autoimmune responses that cause diabetes. His discovery that insulin is produced in the thymus has highlighted a previously unknown mechanism by which self-tolerance is achieved in the thymus.

Dr. Pugliese serves or has served in several research grant review committees of the National Institutes of Health, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the American Diabetes Association, both as reviewer and review committee chair.