Mike Rickels never saw himself as a podcaster. “I listen to The Daily, a few seasons of Serial,” he says. “But really it’s whatever my wife Alyssa is listening to.” As a leading diabetes investigator, his focus was medicine, not media. When he was approached to launch a podcast covering each issue of Diabetes Care, Rickels was hesitant at first. But it was a chat with his future co-host, Alice Cheng, MD, FRCPC, that convinced him. “It was Alice’s enthusiasm,” Rickels says. “It was the opportunity to learn from Alice and to think about diabetes in a broader context than I had before that really swayed me to take on the project.”
While the podcast, Diabetes Care “On Air,” launched last January, Rickels has made a career thinking and talking about diabetes. After earning his undergraduate degree in mathematics and biology from Colgate University, he attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed his residency and an endocrinology fellowship. It was another fateful conversation during this fellowship that led to Rickels’s primary research interest.
“Our division chief at the time, Mitch Lazar [MD, PhD], encouraged me to consider working with the islet transplant program that had just started at Penn,” Rickels says. “As the diabetes consult fellow, I was able to co-manage the first patient with type 1 diabetes who’d received an islet transplant at Penn to help manage their blood glucose.
“That was an exposure where it was clear to me that not much was known about how transplanted islets functioned in the liver,” he adds. “I was fortunate to receive wonderful mentorship at Penn from Ali Naji [MD, PhD], the transplant surgeon who developed the program, and Karen Teff [PhD], a scientist with expertise in studying whole-body physiology and metabolism, to address that question.”
Rickels devised a methodology for interrogating and investigating transplanted islet function as well as determining how patients with hypoglycemia were protected from hypoglycemia following islet transplantation. By identifying those mechanisms, Rickels hopes to ultimately prevent and reverse problems with hypoglycemia through a variety of interventions.
“My interest has largely been around what we can do to replace or preserve islet function, both to secrete insulin and also to secrete the counterregulatory hormone glucagon appropriately for the ultimate maintenance of glucose control in individuals affected by diabetes,” he says. Rickels’s patient-oriented research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
In his current role as the Willard and Rhoda Ware Professor in Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, he sees cell therapy as a potential cure for diabetes in the not-so-distant future. That interest in cutting-edge science makes him an ideal co-host for Diabetes Care “On Air.”
“The goal of the podcast is to give our listeners a rundown of what they can expect in each monthly issue of Diabetes Care,” Rickels says. “We try to really highlight the breadth and depth of the research and science being covered each month.”
In each episode, he and Cheng interview authors of feature articles or special article collections. Another segment, called Rapid Exchange, in which Rickels and Cheng provide quick summaries of their other favorite studies in each issue, has proven especially popular among listeners.
“We want to keep our listeners aware and really pique their interest so they appreciate the importance of the work,” Rickels says. “For them to be inspired to get into the issue themselves and take a deeper dive into the content.”
Special episodes of the podcast cover noteworthy events in the diabetes space, like the release of a National Clinical Care Commission (NCCC) Report to Congress and the release of new results from the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT), where Rickels and Cheng jointly interview a panel of contributors with diverse perspectives.
It is a team effort, but Rickels gives all credit for the podcast’s success to his co-host.
“Alice is a real leader and so engaging and great to chat with,” he says, “that makes it all the more fun to discuss the latest research and approaches to diabetes when we record our episodes.”
