Justification for awarding
“Laura Elo at University of Turku in Finland is awarded the Leif C. Groop Award for Outstanding Diabetes Research 2026. She is professor of computational medicine and has developed statistical and machine learning methods and powerful computational tools to interpret large-scale omics and other digital health data to advance understanding of prediction and progression of type 1 diabetes at molecular level. The knowledge can lead to improved stratification, risk assessment, monitoring and prevention of type 1 diabetes.”
The Leif C. Groop Award is awarded annually by the Lund University Diabetes Centre to a young investigator who is active in any of the Nordic countries.
“I feel very honored and humbled to receive this award. It’s an important recognition for me and my research group. We hope that our studies of how type 1 diabetes develops in different individuals will help prevent type 1 diabetes, delay the progression rate, and contribute to personalised treatments for those who develop the disease," says Laura Elo, professor of computational medicine at University of Turku.
High incidence in Finland
She is research director of the Medical Bioinformatics Centre in Turku, which is home to about 20 researchers in computational medicine and bioinformatics. The centre specialises in functional omics, a field in molecular biology that studies how genes and proteins function and interact in different diseases. Finland is one of the countries in the world with the highest estimated incidence of type 1 diabetes in children, and this is a contributing factor to Laura Elo’s research interest in this disease.
The research group conducts large-scale analyses of blood samples from population studies such as DIPP and INNODIA. DIPP is a Finnish population study which gathers data from children with genetic risk of type 1 diabetes, and the European population study INNODIA collects samples from newly diagnosed individuals and their family members.
“We are very grateful to the children and their family members who participate in these studies. Their contribution makes it possible for us to do our best to try to prevent the disease," says Laura Elo.
Studies of proteins
Laura Elo has studied associations between certain proteins and C-peptide and blood sugar levels in blood samples from newly diagnosed children in the INNODIA study. The levels of these proteins were associated with changing C-peptide levels in children with type 1 diabetes. C-peptide is measured to see if the body is still producing insulin in someone with diabetes. In a follow-up study, the researchers were able to confirm the results in another group of participants.
“We hope that the proteins we have identified can be used as markers to predict the rate of type 1 diabetes progression. If we gain a better understanding of the disease process, we may be able to develop interventions to prevent the disease or delay the progression of the disease," she says.
She also led a study which identified a gene expression signature that could predict the rate of type 1 diabetes progression in participants within the INNODIA study. Additionally, they found a gene expression pattern that was associated with a specific diabetes-related autoantibody. Diabetes-related autoantibodies are used to identify people who are at risk of developing type 1 diabetes.
“It’s important to study the disease from different perspectives to get the full view of the disease. We need to look at both proteins and genes to understand the disease. It’s like being a detective," says Laura Elo.
Different disease progression
There is increasing evidence that type 1 diabetes develops in different ways in children, depending on which diabetes-related autoantibody they develop first. Laura Elo has studied the heterogeneity of the disease in a project where the researchers analysed samples from children with genetic risk of type 1 diabetes in the Finnish study DIPP.
The researchers wanted to investigate whether children who later develop type 1 diabetes have different early immune responses. The research team studied immune cells in blood samples from children who later developed the disease. The study showed that there was a difference in the composition of the immune cells depending on which diabetes-related autoantibody the child developed first. The differences could be linked to different forms of type 1 diabetes, so called endotypes.
“The findings are important because they show that there is a difference at the molecular level in individuals who later develop type 1 diabetes. If we can gain a better understanding of how the disease develops in different children with type 1 diabetes, we may be able to stratify individuals with type 1 diabetes into different subgroups in the future. Hopefully, such knowledge can be used to individualise the treatment of type 1 diabetes," says Laura Elo.
