The Diabetes Research Institute (DRI), a Center of Excellence at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, announced today that the first…
Category: Cure
Is the best way to beat type 1 diabetes to simply stop it before it starts? That’s a question being tackled in new clinical trial that proposes to prevent diabetes in those prone to developing it. “Often times, the best answer is the simple answer,” says Ezio Bonifacio, Ph.D., from the Center for Regenerative Therapies, in Dresden, who led a team of researchers to develop a vaccine to prevent type 1 diabetes. The vaccine has ended up being insulin itself.
Scientists have successfully reversed type 1 diabetes in mice by using adult stem cells and cell surface molecular engineering to reduce the destruction of insulin-producing islet cells.
The key to the breakthrough was introducing adult stem cells...
Researchers with the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson recently announced a plan to prevent type 1 diabetes by intercepting the disease in its earliest stages and stopping its development before the onset of symptoms.
When Doug Melton’s Harvard lab made the announcement last October that they had succeeded in turning human stem cells into functional beta cells, Melton, in a conversation with reporters, talked, too, about the other piece of the puzzle that might enable these cells to survive T1D’s autoimmune attack: encapsulation.
Using human embryonic stem cells as a base, the lab has pioneered a process that can reproduce human, insulin-producing beta cells on a large scale. As Melton said in a conference call with journalists, “What we’re reporting on is something that I think was obvious to many as a possible solution but just turned out to be difficult to achieve, and that is the creation of human beta cells that properly respond to sugar or glucose and secrete the right amount of insulin.”
Researchers at UCLA have confirmed earlier findings that combinations of GABA and Antigen Based Therapy (ABT) works synergistically as a treatment in the NOD mouse model of type 1 diabetes. Diamyd Medical is the exclusive licensee for the commercialization of UCLA's GABA technology for metabolic diseases including in diabetes.
“If we really want to have an effective therapy for diabetes, we need something that works as well as a beta cell,” Dr. Stanger explains, adding that cell therapy, rather than insulin or drug therapy, “actually gives cells back to people to replace the ones that are no longer working or have been destroyed.”
Sometimes, when you’re stuck and spinning your wheels without making much forward progress, putting it in reverse can get you going. That’s what Dr. Lawrence Steinman and his colleagues are doing by attempting to cure type 1 diabetes with a unique and groundbreaking “reverse vaccine.”
n efforts to reach the ultimate goal of a world without T1D, JDRF has been a leader in driving encapsulation research forward.