We have been running for over ten years and exist to support research involving people with type 1 diabetes who want to take part, from the moment they are diagnosed
We do this in four main ways:
•Help people recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes who are interested in getting involved in research find opportunities to do so
•Work alongside other initiatives set up to improve and support type 1 diabetes research, to ensure it has the most impact
•Securely and anonymously collect data and blood samples to help scientists to better understand type 1 diabetes
•Support researchers running suitable clinical trials to get in touch with people who might want to take part
Have you been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the last 6 months?
Are you interested in helping with research?
Why ADDRESS-2 is important and the impact we've had, from the perspective of:
Researchers who have worked with us:
By having an infrastructure across the country that is recruiting at multiple sites (ADDRESS-2), we have a better chance of getting through the studies quickly, learning from them, establishing the next study and moving on with knowledge.
If you want to prevent people losing their insulin making cells; that happens in the first 5 years and particularly in the first 6 months. So we can’t just look at all our patients with type 1 diabetes and invite them to take part in this kind of research, we have to wait for new cases to be diagnosed, and that could be very slow: if we pull just from Cardiff for example where I work then we are only going to get 20-30 newly diagnosed patients a year, but if you pull from across the country we are talking about several hundred a year and that makes it much more possible to do this kind of research.
Diabetes UK, who fund the project
We are extremely grateful to the over eight thousand adults and children living with type 1 diabetes who have contributed their clinical information and biological samples to ADDRESS-2. Thanks to their generous engagement with ADDRESS-2 it is now the largest database in the world providing a vital resource for researchers and ensuring the UK is able to recruit newly diagnosed adults and children onto immunotherapy trials
What it’s like to take part
For me, being involved in something like this was a big positive. If I’m going to have this illness, and if I can be involved in something that might help do something towards it, then that for me is a big positive. I was like, sign me up. I’d certainly recommend someone else who has been recently diagnosed to join ADDRESS-2. Type 1 diabetes is not fully understood and the more people you can add to the research the better; the more chance there is of finding out what causes it, what triggers it, how do we fix it and can we predict it. I would never have found out about the Cardiff trial if I hadn’t joined ADDRESS-2.