Stephen Twigg

Biography

Professor Stephen M. Twigg, MBBS(Hons-I), PhD, FRACP, is a physician-scientist translational researcher, Kellion Professor of Endocrinology and Stan Clark Chair in Diabetes, in the Sydney Medical School, and Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney; plus Head of Dept of Endocrinology and Medical Head of the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Laboratories, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Sydney.

Research Interest

He has been researching diabetes and its complications, specifically the role of growth factors in diabetes, increasingly since 1995. This field of research holds great promise as shown in recent years by the major clinical research driven advance of intra-ocular anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) therapy to stabilise and reverse vision-threatening retinopathy in people with diabetes. His main expertise is the role played by scarring (prosclerotic) growth factors, principally connective tissue growth factor (CTGF/CCN2) and more recently the CCN family, in diabetes end-organ complications, with a primary translational research focus on diabetic cardiomyopathy, liver fibrosis related to diabetes, diabetic nephropathy and wound healing in diabetes, and also fat cell differentiation. His seminal original scientific research findings to date have been the discovery of a new method by which the insulin-like growth factors circulate in human blood and its molecular basis (1998); that CTGF mediates high glucose and advanced glycation regulation of extracellular matrix turnover and fibrosis in diabetes (2002 and 2004); and that CTGF inhibits adipocyte differentiation (2008). His preclinical studies in wound healing in diabetes showed that propolis, as an anti-inflammatory agent derived from bees, normalises wound healing in a rodent diabetes model (2008), as does topical CTGF therapy (2014). In human directed translational research, his recent pilot study in people with foot ulcers in diabetes has shown that propolis has novel efficacy (2014), and in fatty liver studies (2015) he has developed novel data identifying profibrotic biomarkers that aid in the screening of NASH in people with type 2 diabetes. Additional current human research studies are in blood glucose management in people with type 1 diabetes using a novel on line educational tool in exercise in type 1 diabetes (JDRF pilot).