NIH diabetes leader heading to UMass

While at NIH, Harlan was both a clinician and a researcher. His research has focused on type 1 diabetes, in which the body destroys insulin-making islet cells in the pancreas. He has studied a mechanism called tolerance that would allow the survival of transplanted islet cells, which would produce the insulin that type 1 diabetics now must inject daily. In 2001 Harlan and his NIH colleagues brought to the United States an experimental technique developed in Canada called the Edmonton protocol, in which islet cells from cadavers were infused into type 1 diabetics, but the recipients needed to take anti-rejection drugs to keep the cells from being destroyed in an immune system reaction.

On the research side, Harlan said he was attracted to UMass by the opportunity to work with a humanized mouse model of diabetes that UMass researchers developed with The Jackson Laboratory. Scientists are investigating whether induced pluripotent stem cells might be turned into insulin-producing cells.

Harlan graduated from the University of Michigan and Duke University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center. As a US Navy medical officer at the Navy Hospital in San Diego, he studied at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine before returning to Duke to complete a fellowship in endocrinology.