Further, we and others were able to demonstrate that IAPP misfolded protein stress compounds beta cell toxicity by disrupting the key defense mechanisms that clear misfolded proteins such as the autophagy lysosomal pathway (Rivera et al., 2014; Shigihara et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2014) Taken together these findings imply that a therapeutic strategy that decreases IAPP expression to suppress toxic oligomer formation might be a disease modifying therapy in T2D. Here, IAPP is linked to type 2 diabetes mellitus.