Our goal is to develop a treatment that could see the end to the need for these life-long, daily injections by curtailing the early damage caused by the patient’s own immune system.
- Frank Waldron-Lynch
Type 1 diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in children and there is a rapid increase in the number affected each year. About 400,000 people in the UK are affected, 29,000 of them children. In type 1 diabetes, the body’s own immune system mistakes the insulin producing cells of the pancreas as harmful, attacks and then destroys them. The result is a lack of insulin, which is essential for transporting glucose from the blood into cells. Without insulin, glucose levels in the blood rise, causing short term and long term damage: hence patients have to inject themselves several times a day with insulin to compensate.
In a study published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, a team led by researchers from the JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes Inflammation Laboratory at the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research used a drug to regulate the immune system with the aim of preventing a patient’s immune cells attacking their insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.
The drug, aldesleukin, recombinant interleukin -2 (IL-2), is currently used at high doses to treat certain types of kidney tumours and skin cancers. At much lower doses, aldesleukin enhances the ability of immune cells called regulatory T cells (Tregs) to stop the immune system losing control once stimulated and prevent it from damaging the body’s own organs (autoimmunity).
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Image:Diabetes (rotated)
Credit: Jill Brown
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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