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Cure ??

L

litto-miss-loz

Member
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Hey people

Just wondered if anyone has heard of any advances in finding a cure for type 1 diabetes?

Would be good to hear about any developments

cheers. :D
 
A lot of very promising research is going on all over the world. Stem cells, gene therapy and the transplantation of porcine cells are all strong possibilities. I am pretty optimistic about all of this in the long term - in theory curing diabetes is a much easier problem than many other diseases. I am fairly confident that there are diabetics alive today who will one day be "cured" - quite possibly some of the people on this board. However, don't expect this to happen any time soon. The technical difficulties are formidable and anything that even remotely resembles a cure is still years away - possibly even decades away.

What is much more likely to happen soon is that new and improved drugs will become available, and technologies will improve for delivering existing treatments. For example, there is very interesting work being done on building an "artificial pancreas". This is essentially a surgically implanted insulin pump that is controlled by a built in glucose monitor. These devices still haven't been perfected, and even when they are the early ones will, no doubt, be hideously expensive. However, this sort of technology is probably a lot closer than an actual cure.

It is important to be optimistic about all of this. The way that I look at it is that you should work hard to keep yourself healthy so that you will be in a good position to benefit from new treatments as they become available.
 
I say this in every discussion about this, so here I go again: Gene therapy. There's work being done to have certain cells in your digestive tract "re engineered" to become beta cells (that both react to glucose intake and produce insulin).

It seems the most promising. Experiments on mice showed identical BG results between the control mice, and the mice on the gene therapy (and swift death in the untreated mice, unsurprisingly enough!).

I can't remember the URL but if I find it I'll post it later.
 
lionrampant said:
I say this in every discussion about this, so here I go again: Gene therapy. There's work being done to have certain cells in your digestive tract "re engineered" to become beta cells (that both react to glucose intake and produce insulin).
Click to expand...
Absolutely, this work shows tremendous potential - but it is a long way off being useful.

The research that I suspect you are probably thinking of is the work by Lee et al (2000) - that is by far the best known.

Lee,H.C.; Kim,S.J; Kim,K.S.; Shin,H.C. & Yoo, J.W. (2000). Remission in models of type 1 diabetes by gene therapy using a single-chain insulin analogue. Nature 408, 483-488. [Abstract] [Full Paper] (NB the full paper is only available if you are connecting from a subscribing institution).

Although gene therapy will one day be able to do many wonderful things, it is currently very experimental. There have been few human trials with gene therapy in any area, and none that I know of for diabetes. Because diabetes is not caused by an error in a single gene (unlike, for example, the PARK1 variant of Parkinson's disease), it is a much more difficult prospect to treat using gene therapy. The "formidable technical problems" include, immunological rejection (the "foreign" genes may be rejected - in much the same way that people often reject transplanted organs), and potentially fatal side effects (for example some experimental gene therapy has been shown to induce leukemia). All of these major problems need to be solved before human trials could even be complicated, and even then there would still be many years of work before a treatment could be perfected and proved to be safe.

Gene therapy will be, I have no doubt, the best solution to diabetes - because it will fix the problem at the source. However, of all of the prospective approaches to treatments it is the most technically difficult. It will eventually come, but I do think that it is still probably decades away - and possibly many decades at that.
 
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