Overview:

1. To recognize necessary steps to set up a human islet isolation unit
2. To assemble relevant stakeholders in creating a national/regional islet transplantation programme
3. To integrate an islet transplantation program in a pancreas transplantation program

Biography:

Eelco de Koning received his medical doctorate at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1991. Subsequently, he moved to England and started research into islet biology and pathology at the Diabetes Research Laboratories in Oxford under supervison of Anne Clark and Robert Turner which resulted in a PhD thesis in 1994. In the same year he started his training in Internal Medicine followed by a fellowship in Endocrinology at the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU). He was board certified in endocrinology in 2001. Early 2004 he moved to the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and later in 2004 he joined the groups of Susan Bonner-Weir and Gordon Weir at the Department of Islet Transplantation and Cell Biology (Joslin Diabetes Center) in Boston. In their groups he participated in the clinical human islet isolation and transplantation program and in islet progenitor cell research. In 2006 he returned to the LUMC to establish a laboratory for human islet isolation under GMP conditions and to direct the clinical islet transplantation program in the Netherlands. This program is operational since 2007. He is also the diabetes lead for the páncreas transplantation program in the LUMC. In 2010 he was appointed group leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht focusing on islet progenitor cell research. Using a bench-to-bedside approach he has initiated and heads multicenter research programs on improvement of islet transplantation. He was appointed professor of diabetology at the University of Leiden in 2011.