Abstract:
Type 2 diabetes develops years before conventional diagnosis. Identifying individuals at risk and understanding differences in treatment response are central challenges for precision diabetes care.
Our research combines longitudinal human cohorts with experimental studies and discovered follistatin as a mediator of metabolic dysfunction and a predictor of disease progression. Across international cohorts comprising 6,413 individuals, elevated circulating follistatin was associated with incident type 2 diabetes up to 19 years before diagnosis. GWAS and mechanistic studies confirmed its role in inter-organ metabolic signaling. Our further study on GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonist tirzepatide (Eli Lilly) clinical phase 3 trial SURPASS-4 revealed the relationship between baseline follistatin and glycaemic response to tirzepatide. Together, these approaches revealed a novel mechanism in diabetes susceptibility and treatment response. Based on our scientific discovery, we developed AI-driven blood test LDcoder, which detects diabetes risk 4 years before diabetes onset for efficient prevention, providing a foundation for translating follistatin-based biomarkers into tools for early risk assessment and precision diabetes care.
Biography:
Yang De Marinis, PhD, is Associate Professor at Lund University, Sweden, Professor at Shandong University, and Founder, Chairman and CEO of Lundoch Diagnostics. She also serves as board member and regional coordinator of Diabetes Sweden which is one of the largest patient organizations in Sweden.
She received her PhD in diabetes electrophysiology from Lund University in 2010, followed by postdoctoral research at Lund University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Her research connects metabolic mechanisms with clinical investigations. She led the large international study published in Nature Communications in 2021 linking circulating follistatin to future type 2 diabetes risk. This discovery supported the development of LDcoder®, an AI-driven biomarker-based blood test for early diabetes-risk assessment. Her ongoing collaboration with Eli Lilly investigates biomarkers of response to tirzepatide, extending her work from disease prediction towards personalized treatment.
