Diabetes cure in sight, say scientists

A CURE for insulin-dependent diabetes is in sight following a major medical breakthrough announced yesterday.

Scientists in the US have not only halted the disease in mice mimicking human type 1 diabetes, but have succeeded in reversinged it. Plans are under way to conduct patient trials which could lead to the first ever curative treatment for the disorder. The findings coincide with World Diabetes Day.

Type 1 diabetes results in the immune system attacking the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin, the essential hormone that allows the body to obtain energy from glucose.

Sufferers have to give themselves regular insulin injections to balance their blood sugar and ensure what they eat is turned into body fuel. Without insulin jabs, they die.

Until now, there has been no prospect of a cure for the autoimmune illness that affects 194 million people around the world.

But researchers at Massachusetts General hHospital in Boston claim to have reversed the disease in mice by injecting them with spleen cells from healthy animals.

The work was a follow-up to research in 2001, in which spleen cells called splenocytes were shown to halt the autoimmune process behind type 1 diabetes.

At that time, the scientists were surprised to find treated animals did not need a subsequent pancreatic transplant. Their bodies appeared to be secreting insulin anyway.

The unanswered question was whether a few remaining islet cells had been rescued in the diabetic mice, or whether cells were actually being regenerated.

Yesterday’s results, published in the journal Science, confirmed that the pancreas was being reconstructed in the sick mice.

That finding means that, for the first time, there is a prospect of curing patients with type 1 diabetes.

Dr David Nathan, director of the Massachusetts General hospital diabetes center, said: “These exciting findings in a mouse model of Type 1 diabetes suggest that patients who are developing this disease could be rescued from further destruction of their insulin-producing cells.

“In addition, patients with fully established diabetes possibly could have their diabetes reversed,” he said.

Dr Nathan said he had developed a protocol to test the treatment in patients, but additional grant support was needed before a clinical trial could begin.

Regenerating insulin-secreting islet cells was previously thought to be impossible.

But Dr Denise Faustman, director of the hospital’s immunobiology laboratory, who led the research, said: “We’ve found that islet regeneration was occurring and that cells were growing from both the recipient’s own cells and from the donor cells.”

The donated spleen cells appeared to “re-educate” the immune system’s of the diabetic mice so they no longer attacked their own tissues. At the same time they were growing into new islet cells.