Dr. Weir is a member of the Section on Islet and Regenerative Biology, holds the Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation Chair at Joslin, and is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Weir received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1967. Before coming to Joslin, Dr. Weir was Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia. After arriving at Joslin in 1984, Dr. Weir served as the Center's Medical Director for nine years and, throughout, has been conducting a broad research program.
Until recently, Dr. Weir was Director of the NIH supported Diabetes Research Center (DRC) of Joslin, and was Head of the Diabetes Program of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He is currently the Director of Joslin's Center for Cell Transplantation. Dr. Weir is the recipient of numerous honors and serves or has served on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals, including the American Journal of Physiology, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Endocrinology, and Transplantation. He was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Diabetes and currently acts as chairman of the JDRF Encapsulation on Consortium.
Dr. Weir has combined a career of caring for patients with diabetes, with an intensive research focus on beta-cell function preservation and replenishment. His research interests include islet-cell transplantation and encapsulation, the function of islets in the normal and diabetic state, and on developing alternative sources of insulin-producing cells, e.g. using stem cells, reprogrammed pancreatic exocrine cells, genetically manipulated liver cells, and beta-cell replication. Dr. Weir's main research goal is to find ways to preserve and replenish the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells that are deficient in diabetes. Dr. Susan Bonner-Weir is a collaborator on many of these projects. Dr. Weir recently led a multi-center Phase 1/2 clinical trial supported by the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) of NIH to determine the safety and pharmacokinetics of α1-antitrypsin (AAT) treatment AAT in individuals with new-onset Type 1 diabetes. He also participates in other clinical research projects supported by ITN and TrialNet.
