John Todd

JDRF/Wellcome Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (DIL)

John Todd is Professor of Precision Medicine at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and of the JDRF/Wellcome Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (DIL). He is also an Emeritus Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health Research. Until 2016 he was Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Cambridge and prior to this, Professor of Human Genetics and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His PhD was in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Todd helped pioneer genome-wide genetic studies in common diseases and then went on to study the associations between disease-associated genetic variants and phenotypes in T1D by founding and deploying the Cambridge BioResource. He researches type 1 diabetes (T1D) genetics and disease mechanisms with the goal of delivering clinical interventions.

In the latest phase of his research, to translate basic genetic and immunological knowledge to treatment and prevention, the DIL is testing the efficacy of ultra-low doses of interleukin-2 in newly-diagnosed children with T1D to preserve the remaining pancreatic islet beta-cell insulin production and investigating the role of the microbiome in T1D. Todd is also part of the international consortium, Global Platform for the Prevention of Autoimmune Diabetes (GPPAD), aiming to establish primary preventions of T1D in randomised placebo-controlled trials, initially by testing the possibility that daily oral insulin given to children at high genetic risk of T1D can inhibit the autoimmunity that causes T1D. His research in genetics and diabetes has received several awards and prizes, including the 1995 Minkowski Prize of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the 2021 EASD/Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence. Todd has supervised 40 PhD and MSc students with three in progress and has an h-index of 131 and over 40,000 citations.