Seattle, WA--Dr. Christopher Rhodes, Associate Scientific Director of the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI, now PNDRI) in Seattle, today assumes the post of chair of the Medical and Scientific Review Committee of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). In this role, Rhodes will help guide the research program of one of the most influential private sources of funding for diabetes research in the world.

JDRF is committed to spending more than $100 million in 2006 to support research to find a cure for diabetes and its complications. Rhodes, an internationally recognized expert in pancreatic ß-cells, will lead a group of scientists and lay persons in identifying the most promising research directions to accomplish this mission. He will also help coordinate the scrupulous peer-review program by which research projects will be selected for JDRF funding.

"This is a great opportunity both for Dr. Rhodes, and for PNRI," according to Ardy Johnson, a member of PNRI's Board of Trustees and a member of JDRF's national Board. "We are dedicated to finding a cure at JDRF," Johnson says, "and we are doing all we can to target research dollars to those scientific programs that will produce the best and most durable results for diabetes patients and their families. Here at PNRI, our mission is to prevent and cure diabetes in all its forms, and our scientists are conducting pioneering studies in islet biology to make that happen. It is a perfect fit."

Rhodes' own research concentrates on two of the key problems in the body's metabolism of glucose. He has discovered new facets of the way insulin is produced and distributed. And he is examining how beta cells-the sole natural source of insulin-can be protected from the damage of diabetes. With JDRF funding he is also undertaking the study of regenerated beta cells to analyze their function for use in other research as well as for possible transplantation in humans with diabetes.

As the leading charitable funder of diabetes research worldwide, JDRF offers a wide variety of grants and fellowships to qualified researchers. It shepherds its resources carefully to solving the clinical and scientific problems associated with diabetes. It is deliberately building a winning team of researchers to find a cure, a team that Rhodes will now help to lead.

"We are impatient for the cure," Ardy Johnson says, the mother of an adult son who has been struggling with diabetes for almost 25 years. "We have made a promise to our children, and we will not be satisfied until that promise is met. I am grateful that Chris Rhodes has agreed to help us hasten the day when that will happen."