Karmel Allison

Karmel was born in Southern California, diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of nine, and educated at UC Berkeley. Karmel now lives in San Diego with her husband, where she is loving the sunshine, working in computational biology at the University of California, San Diego, and learning to use the active voice when talking about her diabetes.

An In-Depth Look at the Faustman Lab Research – Part 2

Faustman holds that BCG vaccination's primary role in this case is to induce TNF-a expression, and that TNF-a's primary role in this case is to kill the defective autoreactive T cells after they have developed, implying that treatment with BCG will only work with patients who are already diabetic. Faustman put her theory to the test and treated three long-term diabetics with BCG to see whether it would have any effect on their disease status.

TNF, BCG, and You and Me: An In-Depth Look at the Faustman Lab Research

And here’s where things get interesting for a cure-seeking diabetic: when scientists saw that cells were flooding islets with TNF-a, they decided to see what would happen if they changed the levels of TNF-a in mouse pancreases– and they found that changing the levels of TNF-a changes whether a mouse will get diabetes. Now take a guess: we have a blaring distress signal, TNF-a, that turns on all the cells of the adaptive immune system, and we have a disease that is characterized by adaptive immune cells overreacting and killing the body’s own cells...