A weighty new public health threat faces the nation’s children. Riding on the coattails of skyrocketing rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes – once the nearly exclusive province of older adults - is becoming a disease of childhood, particularly within inner-city African-American communities. As a result, says Fredric Wondisford, chief of the Division of Metabolism at Hopkins Children’s, younger and younger adults are suffering from diabetes-related complications such as blindness and kidney failure.

In response, three Johns Hopkins entities - the School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the School of Nursing – along with  the University of Maryland School of Medicine are combining resources to tackle the issues in a new diabetes research center in East Baltimore.

With the recent help of a $7.4 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, the center, housed in the new John G. Rangos Sr. Building on Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus, will “not only allow us to conduct important basic research into what causes diabetes and how to treat and prevent it,” says Wondisford, the new center’s director, “but to apply what we learn in an urban setting.”