Coming soon to a public television stations across the country! Hosted by the television and film actor Laurence Fishburne, the program Information Matrix profiles innovative and exceptional organizations and individuals. An episode titled “Reversing Diabetes” brought a film crew to Iowa City in order to document the work being done within the Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center (FOEDRC). Their feature will be one of three stories the show tells in the episode.

The team also produced a 30-second advertisement for the FOEDRC, which will air for a few weeks on basic cable stations around the Midwest.

The production team spent a day last June shooting footage of lab work and interviewing two researchers within the FOEDRC about the nature of their work understanding and treating diabetes. Sue Bodine, PhD, professor in Endocrinology and Metabolism, described her research into restoring skeletal muscles weakened by diabetes, and Isabella Grumbach, MD, PhD, professor in Cardiovascular Medicine, explained her work mitigating the impact of diabetes at the cellular level.

The intersection of cardiovascular complications and diabetes is also a concern of FOEDRC Director E. Dale Abel, MD, PhD, who was the third interview subject for the program, which will air all over the country over the course of the coming year. Abel spent the majority of his interview outlining the basics of the disease and telling the story of the founding of the FOEDRC. “Crowdfunding before there was a word for it,” he told the interviewer. Hundreds of thousands of dedicated and generous members of the Fraternal Order of Eagles raised more than $25 million as an initial and now ongoing and growing investment to find a cure for this global epidemic. Their story and the story of hundreds of researchers within the FOEDRC are about to get a much bigger audience.