Hi Rick,
Just had a look at the article. Sorry but I think this is another "false dawn" story. It seems to be based on a paper published by a group of researchers in Brazil back in September 2007, so is not exactly new news (looks like the DM has nothing much to report so is having to dredge up old stories!).
The researchers themselves say that
a) the diabetes was induced in the mice, and therefore not necessarily the same as normal human autoimmune development
b) they have no idea whether the TB vaccine (DNA-HSP65) will have any effect whatsoever on humans and they are not actually going to do any reaserch as this would be outside their scope! They seem to have published their findings in the hope that some other research body (with more funds than they have) will take the research further!
Like you Rick, I would love to believe there is something in this but it could be many years before we see any research results.
If anyone is interested in finding out more about this, the research team is:
Rodrigues dos Santos, R.; Deperon Bonato, V. L.; Coelho Castelo, A. A. M. all of Núcleo de Pesquisas em Tuberculose, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Sartori, A. of Instituto de Biociências, UNESP, Botucatu, São Paulo, Brazil.
Vilella, C. A.; Zollner, R. L.; Lopes Silva, C. of Laboratorio de Imunologia Clinica, Departamento de Clinica Medica, Faculdade de Ciências Medicas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil.
The research paper is called "Immune modulation induced by tuberculosis DNA vaccine protects non-obese diabetic mice from diabetes progression", dated 3 September 2007 and is available from Blackwell Publishing for $54.87
