Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium

The Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium (T1DGC) was an international, multicenter program organized to promote research to identify genes and alleles that determine an individual's risk for type 1 diabetes. The program had two primary goals: (1) to identify genomic regions and candidate genes whose variants modify an individual’s risk of type 1 diabetes and help explain the clustering of the disease in families and (2) to make research data available to and establish resources that can be used by the research community. The T1DGC assembled a resource of affected sib-pair families, parent-child trios, and case-control collections with banks of DNA, serum, plasma, and EBV-transformed cell lines. In addition to T1DGC-recruited ASP families, the T1DGC recruited trio families from ethnic groups with lower prevalence of type 1 diabetes. The T1DGC also welcomed the inclusion of earlier ascertained case-control collections (from the UK, Denmark, etc.). Research with T1DGC data has included genome-wide linkage scans, evaluation of the human major histocompatibility complexes, examination of published candidate genes for type 1 diabetes, and examination of autoimmune disease genes and those affecting β-cell function in type 2 diabetes.

In 2007, the T1DGC incorporated over 7,000 cases from the UK (the JDRF/WT case series, aka GRID). GRID samples are available here, and data from dbGaP, the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) and data and documentation at the JDRF/WT DIL.