Research Focus Teams

Diabetes, Obesity

Research Interests

B cells, Cell Signalling, Diabetes, Gene Regulation and Expression, Gene Therapy, Stem cell

Departments

Cellular & Physiological Sciences

Bio

Timothy Kieffer received a PhD in Physiology from the University of British Columbia Canada, studying incretin hormones, and then pursued postdoctoral training on this topic at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. After an initial faculty position in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, he returned to the University of British Columbia, where he is now Professor of Medicine, Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences and Department of Surgery, School of Biomedical Engineering, and Life Sciences Institute. His laboratory is focused on islet biology and the development of novel gene and cell therapy approaches to treat diabetes, and he has co-authored more than 200 publications on these topics and been cited over 20,000 times. In 2016, he took a one year sabbatical at Kyoto University's Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA). In 2021, he took leave-of-absence from the University to serve as Chief Scientific Officer at the San Diego stem cell biotech company ViaCyte.

  • PhD Physiology, University of British Columbia
  • Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Molecular Endocrinology, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School
  • Instructor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School
  • Assistant, Biochemistry, Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Assistant Professor, Medicine and Physiology, University of Alberta
  • Associate Professor, Medicine and Physiology, University of Alberta
  • Senior Scholar Award, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research
  • Scholarship, Canadian Diabetes Association
  • Scholarship, Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research
  • Career Development Award, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation
  • Scholar Award, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research
  • Early Career Scholar Award, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

Recent Publications

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PDX1+ cell budding morphogenesis in a stem cell-derived islet spheroid system

Metabolic switching, growth kinetics and cell yields in the scalable manufacture of stem cell-derived insulin-producing cells

Inoviruses

Thyroid hormone levels correlate with the maturation of implanted pancreatic endoderm cells in patients with type 1 diabetes

Protocol development to further differentiate and transition stem cell-derived pancreatic progenitors from a monolayer into endocrine cells in suspension culture

The impact of different implantation sites and sex on the differentiation of human pancreatic endoderm cells into insulin-secreting cells in vivo

Dynamic Ins2 Gene Activity Defines β-cell Maturity States

Insulin null ß-cells have a prohormone processing defect that is not reversed by AAV rescue of proinsulin expression

Progress Towards a Stem Cell Based Therapy for Diabetes