OU has established leadership in Diabetes through the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center and key departments in the College of Medicine. OU’s Diabetes efforts will have a core mission in understanding, preventing, and treating diabetes and metabolic disease, conditions that represent some of the most pressing and costly health challenges facing Oklahoma and the nation.
By linking basic discovery with clinical and population-level interventions, OU will advance scalable solutions to reduce disease burden and improve long-term outcomes.
OU Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center has quickly emerged as one of the world’s top comprehensive centers of excellence for adults, young adults and children with all types of diabetes. Through novel research aimed at progress toward a cure for diabetes and its complications, dramatically improved patient care options, and programs aimed at preventing the spread of diabetes, the center is rapidly curtailing the impact of the world diabetes crisis.
New research from the University of Oklahoma has found that supplementing pregnant and lactating mice with a naturally occurring compound produced by healthy gut bacteria significantly lowered rates of fatty liver disease in their offspring as they aged.
More than 800 people attended the 2025 Connect+Cure Gala on Wednesday night, raising $4.7 million to support research and programs at the University of Oklahoma Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center.
In June, Huxing Cui, Ph.D., joined the OU Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center as associate professor in the OU College of Medicine, Department of Cell Biology. Prior to joining the OU Health campus, Cui was most recently an associate professor of neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Iowa.
A pioneering research study by Matthew Potthoff, Ph.D. published today in Cell Metabolism details how the hormone FGF21 (fibroblast growth factor 21) can reverse the effects of fatty liver disease in mice. The hormone works primarily by signaling the brain to improve liver function.
The Harold Hamm Diabetes Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences will gain a new deputy director, Matthew Potthoff, Ph.D., effective January 1. Potthoff will also hold the title of Harold Hamm Endowed Chair in Clinical Diabetes Research and professor of biochemistry and physiology, with a secondary appointment in the division of neurology in the OU School of Medicine.
University of Oklahoma researchers have deepened their understanding of a drug’s ability to prevent fat buildup in the liver, a condition that often occurs with obesity and can lead to serious fatty liver disease.
Diabetes and heart disease often go hand in hand. People with diabetes face a much greater risk for heart attack and stroke than those without diabetes, and an estimated two-thirds of people with diabetes eventually die because of heart disease. To better understand that risk, University of Oklahoma researchers are studying the role of platelets, tiny blood cells that help the body form clots to stop a wound from bleeding.
More than 800 people gathered for the 2023 Connect+Cure Gala on November 29 to support the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center and celebrate the progress being made toward finding a cure for diabetes. Now in its sixth year, the Connect+Cure Gala raised more than $1.8 million in support of diabetes research and care, with more than $250,000 raised to specifically sponsor participants in Camp Blue Hawk, a residential camp program for children and teens, ages 9 to 17, with Type 1 diabetes.
