Dr. Stabler, in collaboration with Drs Ashutosh Agarwal and Camillo Ricordi at the University of Miami, has received a $4.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a collaborative effort to move the search for novel treatments for diabetes to a new level. The grant, one of only four awarded, is a part of the Consortium on Human Islet Biomimetics, a group under the newly formed Human Islet Research Network (HIRN)

The grant, entitled “Engineering a Human Physiomimetic Islet Microsystem“, seek to engineer an “islet-on-a-chip” platform for optimizing islet culture. These systems can be used to improve islet quality prior to transplantation, as screening tools for pharmaceuticals, and/or for optimizing beta cell generation from stem cells.