The new merged institute known as Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, taking in the Baker Heart Research Institute and the International Diabetes Institute, has an unparalleled opportunity to confront the most serious diseases plaguing our community in a way that investigates risk factors from the earliest stages - pregnancy and maternal health - right through to chronic disease later in life.
By addressing our research into health and disease as a continuum, rather than a series of unrelated life events, we seek to help people avoid what has been seen in the past as an inevitable next stage in their progress through life. We can seek to reduce risk factors by understanding their relationship with early life and with lifestyle; we can try to arrest the development of risk factor to disease by early intervention; and we can attempt to prevent the onset of this chronic, currently untreatable disease by striving to better understand the interplay between conditions such as heart failure and early preventative steps.
Onset of debilitating disease rarely occurs without some early warning signs. These warning signs and why they are apparent in some people and not in others is a strong focus of our research as is dealing with and understanding more progressed disease stages.
Our research encompasses molecular and cellular biology, basic research; community education and disease prevention work and clinical services; research into life-saving and life-enhancing devices and other therapies; and training of the next generation of important scientists.
Baker IDI Research Themes
Baker IDI comprises five broad themes of research, each of which supports groups of scientists who work in the community as well as researchers who work in a laboratory setting. This bringing together of basic scientists with epidemiologists is central to Baker IDI’s plans as it will ensure that research is directly informed by community needs.
Each of these areas has a team of senior researchers working in labs, in clinics and in the community investigating the effects of diabetes, obesity and heart disease as well as the risk factors for these diseases. Much effort and concentration is focussed on understanding the genetic links in these diseases - why some people are more at risk of their development than others and also, importantly, why some people suffer serious complications and others are less likely to do so.