With three children diagnosed with diabetes, Quinn Petersen is searching for a cure
Sarah Peterson races down the soccer pitch, dribbling past midfield. Should the 13-year-old flick a pass back to her teammate or try to thread between two closing defenders? It's a split second decision, thoughts pinging her brain like a finger snap.
While she scans the field in milliseconds, a bigger question lingers in the back of her mind.
It's the same for parents Quinn and Tiffany Peterson, watching from the sideline, as they joyfully cheer on Sarah at Fuad Mansour Soccer Complex in Rochester.
For them, too, the question seeps in.
"What are Sarah's sugar levels doing right now?"
Such is the life for a person living with diabetes, something the Petersons know all too well. In addition to Sarah, the Petersons' 18-year-old daughter Clarissa and 9-year-old son Seth have also been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. That means three of the four Peterson children have been diagnosed. Son Clayton, 15, does not have diabetes, but the entire family finds themselves helping one another manage this disease daily.
Even when someone with Type 1 diabetes tries to focus on the task at hand—like reacting to a defender stealing the ball on the soccer field, and firing a shot at the net—the disease refuses to be ignored.
Are you tired because you've been running up and down the field? Or is your sugar low and you need to have a quick snack? Any break provides, and forces, a quick time to check.
"Sometimes, diabetes forces it to your mind," says Quinn. "It's reminding her that she can't forget it, at least all the time."
Diabetes is not a disease that one gets to turn off and ignore. Quite the opposite.
Type 1 diabetes causes a person's own immune system to attack itself, and destroy the pancreatic cells that produce insulin. The hormone insulin is responsible for controlling the body's sugar levels.
When a body is depleted of insulin, several health complications can arise. For instance, a person's blood sugar can spike, causing hyperglycemia. But if a person has too much insulin, low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) can occur.
There is no cure for Type 1 diabetes, and patients must manage their insulin and glucose levels for their entire lives, every few hours at a time.
The chronic disease affects 2 million Americans, including roughly 304,000 children and adolescents, according to the American Diabetes Association. Scientists and researchers today aren't sure how to prevent Type 1 diabetes or what triggers it.
Before Clarissa's diagnosis, the Petersons had no known history with the disease.
But since that diagnosis, back in 2010, everything has changed.
For Quinn, that diagnosis led him to rethink his career path. That diagnosis led him to the field of diabetes research, and led him to Rochester for his work at Mayo Clinic.
Today, Quinn Peterson—a chemical biologist who is an assistant professor of physiology at Mayo—works at Mayo Clinic's Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics, where he leads a cutting-edge lab focused on finding a cell replacement therapy for people living with diabetes.
In 2010, while living in Illinois, Quinn and Tiffany were preparing to take then almost 4-year-old Clarissa to a birthday party. Their daughter seemed particularly lethargic that day, the parents recall, which capped off a few days where the child simply "hadn't seemed like herself."
They thought it was something benign, but figured they would bring her to the doctor just to check. After some labs and a check-up, the parents were told to expect a call in a few days.
Quinn went off to work at the University of Illinois, where he was in a lab working on chemotherapeutic drugs. A few hours later, Tiffany called him, and said they needed to take their daughter to the emergency room. The Petersons rushed home, and ended up staying at the hospital for two days.
"I remember when I first got home, feeling a little bit foolish," Quinn says. "Foolish that I hadn't recognized these signs. I'm not a physician, but I am a scientist. I am aware of diabetes, and yet it had never occurred to me that this might be what was going on."
There was a flood of emotions for the parents. What would this mean? Most kids hate shots at the doctor, how many times would their child need an injection at home, every day? How do you explain a concept like diabetes to a preschooler?
It was a whirlwind of information coming all at once.
"Most of the time at the hospital they were educating my wife and I about what we needed to do for the rest of her life; how to manage her glucose, and to make sure that she, frankly, would not die. It was about how to keep her alive," Quinn says. "That was a challenging few days, and a new start for us. We talk about how that really became a turning point. Things didn't ever become 'normal' again, but we settled into a new normal."
For many families with young children, meal times are often already a battle, and now every meal would involve meticulous thought and planning. The family put a calculator and a white board in the kitchen, so they could figure out the amount of carbs in a particular meal, and how much insulin would need to be administered at each meal.
After living with the disease for a decade, Sarah Peterson loses count of how often she checks her blood sugar every day.
She usually checks her continuous glucose monitor after she first wakes up. There's also the time before she gets on the school bus to Kellogg Middle School. Wait, there's another time before that, after breakfast.
Is there another time before going to school? she asks her mom during our interview.
The children now all have continuous glucose monitors. Although, even when the kids are asleep, parents need to be alert.
Quinn and Tiffany joke that their children have learned over the years how to drink an entire juice box in the middle of the night without even opening their eyes.
"Their blood sugar could be at a good number, so you send them to bed, but it could dip during the night. You worry 24-7," Tiffany says. "Now with the continuous glucose monitor, it takes away some of that constantly having to monitor and worry. The CGM will alert you if there is something going wrong."
Parents with young children often need a bag with an extra diaper or crayons to keep a child occupied at a restaurant, but parents of children with diabetes will often carry a small lunch box—like a bag with extra supplies—items to check the children's blood, extra snacks, and insulin. It's not to keep the child occupied, it's to keep them free from a potential emergency room visit.
Finding a cure for diabetes has long been seemingly on the horizon. Quinn recalls speaking with a patient who was once told there would be a cure in three to five years when he was first diagnosed. The catch? That was more than 40 years ago.
Is a cure on the way? Peterson remains cautious—again, those living with diabetes have been promised a cure for decades— but he is also optimistic. Peterson's team is still in preclinical testing. From there they would need regulatory approval, and begin human testing. The timeline for an eventual public release is still years away.
There are several other groups in addition to Peterson's lab working on similar therapeutic solutions. For instance, VertexPharmaceuticals is currently underway with clinical trials using a similar treatment.
"I absolutely see it being a reality in my children's lifetime. That's what gives me hope," Quinn says.
How did Quinn Peterson end up at Mayo Clinic, studying the very disease his children live with every day?
Back in 2010, he was nearing the end of his graduate student program at the University of Illinois. That's when daughter Clarissa was diagnosed.
While Quinn had been looking for chemical biology programs in the cancer drug discovery space, he started feeling a pull in another direction.
"That made me take a pause, and look at things; 'If I am going to have a career in research, where do I want to be putting my efforts?' I felt an obligation to use the skills and knowledge I have as a scientist to bring that to bear," Quinn says.
From there, he found the Harvard University research lab of biologist Doug Melton, who eventually became co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Melton's lab was working on cell transplant therapies for patients with Type 1 diabetes.
Melton's story will sound familiar. A well-known researcher in the world of Type 1 diabetes—maybe the best known, according to some—Melton had been studying developmental biology with frogs until his six-month old was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
"Doug is a model of what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to be, as a father and a researcher," Quinn says.
After working with Melton's lab for more than five years, an opportunity with Mayo Clinic arose. The close collaboration between the Clinic and the lab helped Peterson decide to make the move.
He took the job at Mayo in 2017. In 2020, his team discovered how to manufacture cells capable of generating a hormone that regulates low blood sugar. The breakthrough was published in Nature Communications.
Today, Peterson's lab in the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics is working on cell therapy that would theoretically allow individuals with Type 1 diabetes to produce their own insulin and also manage glucose levels.
If ultimately successful, the cell therapy could make insulin injections four and five times a day, and constant glucose monitoring, a thing of the past.
And it's not just Quinn. The entire Peterson family is involved with helping those living with diabetes, "24-7."
The Peterson children have become advocates for other children living with the disease. School nurses have had them lend a hand to other students who have been recently diagnosed. They hosted a climbing camp at Roca Climbing in Rochester to show others that those living with Type 1 diabetes can still have an active life.
The kids have also attended and volunteered at Camp Needlepoint, a camp designed specifically for children with Type 1 diabetes to spend time with each other.
Informally, the Peterson family will respond to emails or phone calls from a friend of a friend who might need help. Due to high costs of insulin, issues with insurance coverage, the diabetes community is forced to advocate for and help each other.
"I remember when my kids were young, really young, and my daughter said to my wife, 'Diabetes is a really hard thing in my life.' As a 3-year-old, or as a 5-year-old, you shouldn't have that hard of a thing in your life. You should be able to just be a kid," Quinn says.
"The most meaningful thing for me is to see how strong and resilient my kids have become as a result of this disease. The reality for someone living with this disease ... is there is a real possibility that they could end up dying. To see (my children) face that, learn how to deal with the uncertainty, and be able to adopt an attitude that 'This disease isn't going to define me. It isn't going to limit me.' That has been really inspiring to see," he says.
