A new study from the Faustman Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests that a nearly 100 year old tuberculosis vaccine called BCG may hold…
Tag: Faustman Lab
Faustman says that her work has raised the ire of some scientists and organizations for two reasons: It runs counter to the prevailing research emphasis to either prevent type 1 diabetes, or reverse it in people who have been recently diagnosed with diabetes and, at the time, ran into a stiff political headwind from embryonic stem cell researchers.
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.
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...
Last week, diabetes headlines were dominated by a new study from the Faustman Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, published on Wednesday, August 8th on PLoS One, suggesting that a 90-year-old tuberculosis vaccine called BCG might hold promise for people living with type 1 diabetes. “Human Study Reignites Debate Over Controversial Diabetes ‘Cure,’” wrote Reuters. “Diabetes May Be Reversed By Long-Used Vaccine for TB,” proclaimed Bloomberg news.