Autoimmune Life Blog

In the face of COVID-19, the Brooke family got used to things being canceled: school and work now happen at their home in Portland, Oregon. Twins Zoe and Andrew had to change their plans for their 10th birthday party.

Even before the governor closed the schools, I think we realized COVID-19 was going to be a really big deal. Still, for many of us, that was the day it hit home. The virus was going to alter the way we live, work, learn and connect with others - maybe for years to come.

In February, Dana VanBuecken, ARNP, was living her normal life as a clinical research nurse and mother of four who lives with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

We recently kicked off a potentially game-changing partnership with the new Allen Institute for Immunology. Fueled by a $125 million gift from the late Paul G. Allen, this partnership aims to learn more about how the immune system works from health to disease.

When some people are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D), the disease progresses so quickly that their pancreas stops making insulin within a year.  For others, the process is slower and this can make their T1D easier to manage.  But what if we could identify these fast progressors early, and ma

BRI is inviting Seattle-area adults to participate in the Sound Life Project, a groundbreaking research study to build a baseline of knowledge over time about the human immune system to better understand disease.

Matt Dufort, PhD, fights diabetes one data point at a time. Matt is a bioinformatician at Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI), where he’s been using his data wrangling and analysis skills to find ways to prevent pancreatic damage in people living with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

What is the difference between an individual whose pancreas will continue producing insulin for 50 years, versus someone whose body may suddenly stop generating it within the next 18 months? That is the question Cate Speake, PhD, spends her days trying to answer.

Managing your autoimmune disease may require quick and easy access to a bathroom, checking your blood sugar in public, finding a step-free route into a store, or knowing that safe foods will be on the menu.

Megan and Madeline Coder are twins who do everything together — like ballet and even raising sheep in their hometown, Battle Ground, Washington. But in the fall of 2014, when Megan was nine, she learned she had something that Madeline didn’t: type 1 diabetes (T1D).