Marc Rendell, M.D., Medical Director
MARC RENDELL, M.D.
Dr. Rendell has served as a founder and Medical Director of the Foundation since 1999 while Professor of Medicine at the Creighton School of Medicine. His work focuses on clinically relevant areas of physiology of diabetes and vascular disease. He retired from the Creighton University School of Medicine in 2016 to devote himself entirely to Foundation work. Dr. Rendell is a graduate of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center and spent several years as a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health where he worked with Dr. Martin Rodbell where his research on adenylate cyclase eventually won him the Nobel Prize. Dr. Rendell spent several years on the Endocrinology Faculty at Johns Hopkins, where the chief of medicine was Dr. Victor McKusick, who pioneered research into inherited diseases. For over 30 years, Dr. Rendell was Director of the Creighton Diabetes Center. In 1999, he began his service as Medical Director of the Rose Salter Medical Research Foundation, dedicated to research and education on diabetes and related metabolic disease. ects on the heart, the kidneys, nerve function, and the eyes. Dr. Rendell has had a particular interest in skin microvascular perfusion in diabetes. He published the first description of cutaneous diabetic microangiopathy, demonstrating that the skin in diabetes reflects a microvascular impairment similar to the abnormalities seen in the eyes and kidneys.
He has been involved in most of the research programs which have brought new agents to market for the treatment of diabetes and its complications. Over the years, he has contributed to the development of glimepiride, glargine insulin, inhaled insulin, several DPP-4 inhibitors, and GLP-1 agonists, including exenatide ER, and the SGLT2 inhibitors. He was a principal investigator in the landmark EMPA-REG study which showed that empagliflozin given to typical type 2 diabetes patients reduced cardiovascular events and mortality by up to 30%.
Further studies have focused on diabetic nerve disease, retinopathy, and kidney disease. We were involved in the reasearch program for gabapentin and pregabalin in painful diabetic neuropathy as well as in the first studies which showed the benefits of ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers in diabetic kidney disease.
Although diabetes has been a prime focus for the Foundation for all these years, we have also been involved in major trials of agents to reduce cholesterol. We participated in the first statin trials, including lovastatin, atorvastatin and rosuvastatin. We are now working with the PCSK9 inhibitors, the new generation of very powerful cholesterol lowering drugs.
Dr. Rendell has collaborated with Dr. Binh Ngo, Associate Professor of Dermatology at the Keck USC School of Medicine in Los Angeles on skin disease in diabetes. This work led to the discovery that diabetic microvascular disease affected not only the kidneys and the eyes, but was generalized and affected the skin. This phenomenon explains the susceptibility of diabetes patients to develop foot ulcers among other skin problems.
Over the past several years, Dr. Rendell has become involved in the study of malignancy, benefiting from a close association with Dr. Henry Lynch, who has brought the concept of hereditary cancer to the forefront of our understanding of malignancy. They recently published a review on familial prostate cancer, one of the most diverse forms of hereditary malignancy.