Prof. Michele Solimena, MD PhD

Michele studied medicine at the University of Milano, where he obtained a MD and a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology. After an assistant and associate professorship in the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, he became group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biology and Genetics in Dresden in 2001. In 2003, he was first appointed Professor of Experimental Diabetology at the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden. In 2009, he was then appointed Professor of Molecular Diabetology, also at the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden, and in parallel was made spokesman of the Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden of the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD). Since 2015, he has also been director of the Institute for Pancreatic Islet Cell Research (IPI) at Helmholtz Munich.

As a postdoc Michele discovered the autoimmune pathogenesis of stiff-man/person syndrome, and GAD65 as major autoantigen in this disease and type 1 diabetes (Solimena et al., NEJM 1988; NEJM 1990, Baekkesokov et al., Nature 1990). Turning his attention to the biology of insulin-secretory granules, he discovered how retrograde signaling of ICA512/PTPRN through STAT5 enables pancreatic islet beta cells to adjust their granule production to consumption to replenish insulin stores and maintain glucose homeostasis (Ort et al., EMBO J, 2001; Trajkovski et al., JCB 2004; Mziaut et al., Nature Cell Biol 2006; Mziaut et al., PNAS 2008; Trajkovski et al., JBC 2008). He identified PTBP1 as a key mRNA binding-protein for promoting in a concerted fashion the glucose-stimulated stability and translation of mRNAs for granule cargoes, including insulin and ICA512 (Knoch at al., Nature Cell Biol 2004; Knoch et al., Cell Metabolism 2006). He showed that aging of granules correlates with their loss of competence for microtubule-mediated transport, conceivably accounting for the preferential exocytosis of younger granules (Ivanova et al., Diabetes 2013; Hoboth et al., PNAS 2015; Müller et al., Sci. Rep. 2017, Kemter et al., PNAS 2021). Using FIB-SEM his lab resolved the whole beta cell microtubule network, the first time this was achieved in a mammalian cell (Müller et al., JCB 2021; Xu et al., Nature 2021). He further pioneered the study of laser captured microdissected islets/beta cells from metabolically phenotyped living donors, hence unraveling for the first time transcriptomic and proteomic changes of islets in situ along the progression from normoglycemia to type 2 diabetes (Solimena et al., Diabetologia 2018; Wigger et al., Nature Metabolism 2021; Gloyn et al., Nature Metabolism 2022).