Summer 1997, Onno Terpstra, the head of our Surgery Department, asked me to explore our options for starting clinical islet isolation and transplantation in our center – the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), and prepare a roadmap.

September 1997, at the IPITA congress in Milan (1) , I learned from Camillo Ricordi, the scientific director of the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) in Miami – where many guest collaborators work – that visiting the DRI some weeks might be a good option to gain sufficient first work experience in his clinical islet transplantation group.

December 1997, with a ‘Roadmap’, I got the green light to start the operationalization of clinical islet transplantation in the LUMC, first with a working visit to Miami to study the state of the art ‘Ricordi’ method of human islet isolation, and then start the human islet isolation work in our Surgery lab in Leiden.

In 1990 I had already gained some initial research experience in our Leiden Islet Laboratory with a small number of isolations of islets from human donor organs, using our innovative method of density gradient purification based on the UW solution (2).

During the first three months of 1998 I worked intensively with my student colleague Josephine Rijkelijkhuizen so that she would be able to continue our xenotransplantation research project as independently as possible in our Surgery research team.

April 1998, after participating in the 1st Workshop on Clinical Islet Transplantation in New Orleans (3) – the ideal introduction – a fruitful working visit to the DRI in Miami followed (4,5), with intensive collaboration with the DRI team on, among other things, six human islet isolations, and also the simultaneously (parallel) conducted research into the purification of the human islets in our Iodixanol gradient in UW-Solution (6).

Here a slideshow illustrating this team up with the DRI team in Miami , working on human islet isolation and purification in the innovative Iodixanol-UWS gradient, April-May 1998.

Notes

1) Innovative Islet Purification in Iodixanol-UWS • IPITA 97 • Michel van der Burg • Miracles.Media • @1MEMO 20250128 • TakeNode • URL michelvanderburg.com/2025/01/28/

2) Percoll UWS Purification Pancreatic Islets • ESOT 1991 Talk • Michel van der Burg • Miracles.Media • @1MEMO 20250114 • URL michelvanderburg.com/2025/01/14/

3) Invited participant 1st Workshop on Clinical Islet Transplantation, New Orleans (LA, USA) April 17–19, 1998

4) Working visit April – May 1998 at the “fast track” center of the Diabetes Research Institute (Scientific director Prof. C. Ricordi, MD) of the University of Miami (Miami, FL, USA)

5) DRI Dream Team • Michel van der Burg • Miracles.Media • @1MEMO 20250105 • URL michelvanderburg.com/2025/01/05/

6) Human Islet Purification Miami 1998 • Michel van der Burg • Miracles.Media • 20181102 • URL michelvanderburg.com/2018/11/02/

Citation info : Human Islet Isolation • DRI Miami 1998 • Michel van der Burg • Miracles.Media • @1MEMO 20250204 • TakeNode 86e4a319-a769-44d5-8fa5-de2ca90ab63c • URL michelvanderburg.com/2025/02/04/