Dr. Timothy Kieffer received a Doctoral degree in Physiology from UBC. He carried out postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has been faculty member at UBC since 2002.
Dr. Kieffer’s research uses a variety of approaches aimed at creating a viable, glucose-responsive source of insulin-producing cells for use in diabetes treatment. For example, he published an important paper in Science demonstrating that genetic engineering could be used to make gut cells release insulin in a meal-responsive manner – work that is being purred by enGene, a biotech company he co-founded. His group has also collaborated with industry to generate glucose-responsive insulin producing cells from human embryonic stem cells – work published in Nature Biotechnology and runner-up for Science’s 2014 Breakthrough of the Year.
Dr. Kieffer has consistently been awarded grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (US), the Stem Cell Network and the Canadian Diabetes Association that, together, typically exceed $1 million per year.
