Nov. 1, 2024 — When Melanie Shapiro, Ph.D. ’20, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 5, she remembers more of the positive experiences associated with the event — family members bringing her gifts at the hospital, being doted on.

It wasn’t until she went to school that she noticed some of the challenges of living with Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system treats insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas as foreign invaders and destroys them. Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels and metabolism.

“I wasn’t really allowed to do any of the things I needed to, like test my blood sugar or give myself an insulin shot, without going to the nurse’s office,” said Shapiro, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. “It was a rule basically built in to protect the other kids from seeing that and was a big inconvenience for me.”

Shapiro’s parents optimistically shared articles detailing the latest claims of diabetes “cures” with their daughter, but she only found it frustrating that they didn’t understand her condition and why a cure was so hard to develop. So, she decided to dedicate her career to figuring it out for herself.

A postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Todd Brusko, Ph.D., a professor in the University of Florida College of Medicine Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine and research director for the UF Diabetes Institute, Shapiro has spent nearly a decade in Gainesville researching diabetes immunotherapies, beginning as a doctoral student. Now, she’s an emerging leader in the diabetes research landscape, working toward starting her own lab.

Shapiro’s research focuses on the interplay between common genetic variants and patient responsiveness to Type 1 diabetes immunotherapies. There is currently one immunotherapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Type 1 diabetes prevention, but approving others would allow multiple options to be available on the market for patient use.

“We’ll need to understand what drugs work better for different people, or if they may need different doses or need to be given doses at different times of the disease progression,” Shapiro said. “It’s about understanding how best to target people to different therapies, which is right now a bit more at the conceptual stage but hopefully should become more translational soon.”

Shapiro’s search for the right place to pursue her doctoral degree in 2015 brought several options into her orbit. At the time, the diabetes research community was abuzz about two findings in particular: A Harvard University group had developed a form of beta cell replacement therapy, and an immunotherapy clinical trial that had recently wrapped at UF was the second immunotherapy to ever have been proven to work for Type 1 diabetes in people.

Shapiro sent emails to principal investigators at the programs she had applied to, eager to ask questions about her research interests.

“The place that had the most receptive people was UF,” she said.

She had emailed Mark Atkinson, Ph.D., the founding director of the UF Diabetes Institute, and he sent a lengthy reply. The two then connected on Skype.

“He told me about the trial, and what he thought about immunotherapies versus beta cell replacement therapies, and he basically treated me like a peer, in the sense that when I would bring up ideas, he would be super open to looking into them,” Shapiro said. “It was something I’d never experienced anywhere else. I talked to people at all these other places, and it was people saying, ‘This is what I study, and that’s what you’re going to study.’ At UF it was like, ‘You’re interested in this, we can make that happen.’”

As a Ph.D. student in the College of Medicine’s biomedical sciences program, Shapiro received a Children’s Miracle Network Research Award from UF, a National Institutes of Health T32 grant, and an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award.

Now four years into her postdoctoral fellowship, she recently received a highly selective NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, granted to promising postdoctoral scientists to support their timely transition to a faculty position.

“I’m excited to be more of a driver of my own research,” Shapiro said. “I really like the initial parts of research, like writing grants and conceptualizing things. And I also like the end part of research — interpreting results and contextualizing things. So, I think having my own lab would be perfect for what I enjoy.”