Contact: Sue Pondrom (619) 543-6163 

Jerrold Olefsky Receives 2nd Prestigious MERIT Award 
For Promising Diabetes Research   

Jerrold Olefsky, M.D., UCSD School of Medicine researcher and professor of medicine, has received a $2.6 million 5-year MERIT Award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to continue highly promising research on the basic mechanisms of insulin action and diabetes.

The Olefsky grant is one of the few times that the NIDDK has given a MERIT award twice to the same researcher. Olefsky’s first MERIT award, which ended in 1997, covered clinical research and insulin resistance in patients.

In the NIDDK letter to Olefsky, the Institute noted that “the MERIT award acknowledges your consistent and excellent contributions to scientific knowledge.” 

MERIT (Method to Extend Research In Time) awards are designed to provide a few outstanding investigators with the opportunity for long-term stable support, which will enhance their continued scientific creativity and lessen the administrative burdens associated with the preparation and submission of competing grant applications. 

Affecting more than 16 million Americans, diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin, a hormone needed to convert the body’s main source of sugar – glucose - into energy needed for daily life.  Glucose is carried to each cell through the bloodstream, with the help of insulin. 

For nearly 15 years, Olefksy’s research has focused on insulin and insulin resistance.  He was one of the first researchers to show that insulin resistance is one of the prominent causes of diabetes.  His current work explores the basic mechanisms of insulin action with a particular focus on the insulin signaling pathway leading to stimulation of glucose transport.

“We need to know how insulin works normally in the body to better understand what goes wrong,” he said. “Our new research will utilize new scientific methods such as specially bred mice where genes have been manipulated to express specific insulin-action characteristics and microarray chip technology that allows us to explore abnormalities at basic DNA levels.”

A member of the Institute of Medicine, Olefsky is chief of UCSD’s division of endocrinology and metabolism at UCSD and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and scientific director of the Whittier Institute for Diabetes in La Jolla.  Among his seminal contributions to the basic understanding of insulin action has been the identification of the role of human insulin resistance as a primary cause of Type II (non-insulin dependent, adult-onset) diabetes.  He has helped define the intracellular pathways for insulin and growth factor action, and helped develop insulin-sensitizing drugs that are now standard therapies for Type II diabetes.