Glucose-responsive insulin is one of the technologies on the horizon that Kowalski says he’s most excited about. The other is encapsulation, where insulin-producing cells would be protected from the body’s auto-immune attack.
“This approach has the potential to provide diabetics with a new pancreas that is protected from the immune system, which would allow them to control their blood sugar without taking drugs. That’s the dream,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT, who oversaw Vegas’s work.
“In alignment with the ADA’s position that diabetes does not define people, the word ‘diabetic’ will no longer be used when referring to individuals with diabetes…
Researchers have gained an understanding of these presymptomatic stages of type 1 diabetes through the TrialNet data, and through studies including TEDDY (The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young), which for the past decade has been collecting data from 400,000 children genetically at risk of developing T1D.
Philip J. Shaw of the JDCA argues that their analysis of JDRF funding shows that not only has the amount of money being spent on cure research declined, but that the chunk of money spent on research is a shrinking part of the JDRF’s overall budget.
This is an important study because really it’s the first to show a defined effect between the development of the microbiome in infancy and the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. It opens doors to further questions. What I think will come out of this are targeted, prophylactic treatments rather than something that’s meant to cure disease. Scientists need to dig further into what are the important species that are protective in these children.
The study could have important implications for identifying the disease at a very early stage, delaying its onset or even preventing it altogether. Dr. Julia Greenstein, vice president of discovery research at JDRF, which helped fund the study, says that the work is very preliminary, but points toward strategies for prevention that haven’t yet been explored.
Todd Hobbs, the chief medical officer for North America at Novo Nordisk, knows diabetes from all angles: as a patient; as an endocrinologist (for ten years he ran a clinical practice focused on patients of all ages with diabetes); as an executive at a pharmaceutical company working to develop new treatments (he’s worked at Novo Nordisk since 2004); and as a parent (one of his six sons was diagnosed with type 1 at age five)
Both type 1 and type 2 are on the rise: since 1985 the number of people with diabetes worldwide has increased ten-fold, from 35 million to 371 million; and it’s projected to double again over the next two decades.
I watched a controversial video documentary on The New York Times’s web site, Midnight Three & Six, about a family pummeled by life with their fifteen-year-old daughter Grace’s volatile type 1 diabetes. One parent or another gets up to check Grace every three hours at night, to make sure she doesn’t die in her sleep. “Every three hours keeps her safe,” says Grace’s mother.