On Saturday, May 16, 2020, the JDRF Greater Bay Area Chapter will host the 22nd Annual Hope Gala, bringing prominent business leaders and families from around the Bay Area to The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco for an evening of fundraising, celebration, and networking. The event will benefit JDRF and type 1 diabetes (T1D) research.

Each year at the Hope Gala, JDRF honors individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to the foundation’s mission of improving lives today and tomorrow by accelerating life-changing breakthroughs to cure, treat, and prevent T1D and its complications. This year’s honorees are Co-Directors of the Northern California Center of Excellence:  Dr. Matthias Hebrock, Ph.D, UCSF, & Seung Kim, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford. They will be presented with the JDRF Greater Bay Area Chapter Innovation Award.

The JDRF Northern California Center of Excellence will accelerate high-impact research at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, to drive T1D cures to commercial development. This exciting new initiative is a cure accelerator and purposefully ambitious.

“We’re excited that the Northern California center is our first Center of Excellence,” said Aaron J. Kowalski, Ph.D., President and CEO of JDRF. “The scientists at Stanford and UCSF are leaders driving true innovation as they advance research into the immune system, beta cells, and stem-cells.” Click here to learn more.

Dr. Matthias Hebrok, Ph.D., has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the development of the pancreas and its insulin-producing beta cells. Recipient of several JDRF research grants, Dr. Hebrok and colleagues have implemented the information gained from his earlier studies to generate functional beta cells from stem cell populations, which is vital in beta cell replacement therapies. Building on this work, Dr. Hebrok’s group continues to develop a strategy for producing insulin-producing cells that can be transplanted without the need of long-term immunosuppression.

Seung Kim, M.D., Ph.D., aims to enhance our understanding of mechanisms that regulate normal development of insulin-producing cells and other islet cells. This work is crucial in our efforts to restore insulin-production in people with T1D. The recipient of several JDRF grants, Dr. Kim has pioneered new approaches to create, expand and regenerate islets. His team has been able to differentiate functional glucose-responsive islets from stem cells and other cell lines. They are now using their strategy to isolate candidate islet stem/precursor populations from adult human stem cell populations.

JDRF is pleased to present this year’s award to Co-Directors of the Northern California Center of Excellence: Dr. Matthias Hebrock, Ph.D, UCSF, & Seung Kim, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford. Thank you and congratulations!

Click here to learn more about the JDRF Northern California Center of Excellence.

Visit www.jdrf/bayarea/hope-gala for more details about the 2020 JDRF Hope Gala.