Scientists Hold Out Hope for Diabetes Cure

Partial success in mice highlights new treatment's potential, experts say

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

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THURSDAY, March 23 (HealthDay News) -- Three years ago, scientists announced a new treatment had cured diabetes -- in mice.

But researchers reporting in the March 24 issue of Science say three separate attempts to replicate that pioneering study have proven only partially successful.

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The results, while not stellar, still leave the cup of hope at least half-full for people with diabetes, experts say.

In fact, Dr. Denise L. Faustman, the scientist who performed the first study, contends the cup is still "100 percent full, because the new studies confirm that it is possible to stop the process by which the immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing islet cells." Islet cells reside in the pancreas, but are destroyed in the type 1 form of diabetes.

Faustman is director of Massachusetts General Hospitals Immunology Laboratory. Her group reported in 2003 that a two-phase treatment had restored islet cell function in mice with a condition similar to human type 1 diabetes, in which the body does not produce insulin.

Type 1 diabetes generally appears early in life and is much more difficult to treat than obesity-associated type 2 diabetes, in which the body's insulin production gradually declines.

Plans for a trial to see if type 1 diabetes can be reversed in humans are well underway at Massachusetts General Hospital, Faustman said, despite the partial failure of the three subsequent trials in mice.

In the original trial, the diabetic mice were first injected with TNF-alpha, a naturally occurring protein that stopped the immune system's attack on the islet cells. That was followed by an injection of spleen cells from healthy mice, used because they carry proteins that help immune cells to recognize and ignore normal tissue.

The idea was that the spleen cells would stop the autoimmune attack, giving transplanted islet cells time to restore insulin production. But, in a surprising development, no transplants were needed because insulin was produced by islet cells that suddenly grew on their own in the rodents' pancreas -- some of them transformed from the injected spleen cells.

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