[Diabetes-talk] FW: [acb-diabetics] FW: Chicago Tribune Listing - Take a look! sent from Rob

[Mike Freeman]

From: acb-diabetics-bounces at acb.org [mailto:acb-diabetics-bounces at acb.org]
On Behalf Of Patricia LaFrance-Wolf
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 11:12 AM
To: Acb-Diabetics at Acb. Org
Subject: [acb-diabetics] FW: Chicago Tribune Listing - Take a look! sent
from Rob

 

 

 

  _____  

From: Robertglafrance at Hotmail.com [mailto:Robertglafrance at Hotmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 1:05 AM
To: plawolf at earthlink.net
Subject: Chicago Tribune Listing - Take a look! sent from Rob

 

Rob recommends this article to you!

This is why he recommends the article to you. Interesting

Is BCG a cure for diabetes? The long road to acceptance 

from the Chicago Tribune

The first trial in a handful of humans has suggested that injecting patients
with Type 1 diabetes with an inexpensive vaccine normally used to prevent
tuberculosis can block destruction of insulin-secreting pancreatic cells
<http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-bcg-diabetes-20110625,0,6341862.story>
in humans and allow regeneration of the pancreas. Such a finding, if
confirmed and expanded on, could lay the foundation for freeing the
estimated 1 million U.S. Type 1 diabetics from their daily insulin shots. It
brings up a word that is rarely or never used in considering the disease:
"cure." Such an outcome is still a long way in the future, but Dr. Denise
Faustman of Massachusetts General Hospital has already come a long way in
her quest to find a new treatment paradigm for diabetes.

Researchers have always assumed that insulin-secreting cells could never be
regenerated. Once they are gone, they are gone forever, the theory held.
Scientists have thus focused on ways to prevent their loss -- such as by
developing vaccines that will halt the immune system's attack on the
pancreas before all the cells are destroyed -- or by transplanting
replacement cells from a donor. The first approach has not yet shown much
success, and the second has provided only limited benefits.
Insulin-secreting cells for transplants are difficult to obtain in quantity,
provoke a strong immune response and require immunosuppressive drugs. They
can "cure" diabetes, freeing patients from their insulin secretions, but the
benefits often disappear with time.

Faustman started out as a transplanter, learning her technique from Dr. Paul
Lacey of Washington University of St. Louis, a pioneer in the field. When
she came to Mass General in 1985, she was confident that she could do the
transplants better than other researchers and that her attempts would
succeed. For one of the few times in her life, however, it turned out that
she was wrong.

She decided to go back into the lab and attempt to figure out why the
transplants were failing. Most researchers had studied transplants in mice
in which the pancreas was artificially destroyed. Faustman decided to look
at mice that, like humans, had a strong propensity to develop diabetes
naturally. She found that the transplants failed in those animals just like
they had in her human trials, and she eventually determined that the
rodents' immune systems were attacking the transplanted cells just like they
had their own pancreases.

Eventually, she developed a two-pronged attack. First she injected the mice
with Freund's Complete Adjuvant, a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead
bacteria that is sometimes used to increase the power of vaccines. The
adjuvant overstimulated the immune cells that were attacking the pancreas,
causing them to self-destruct. She also injected the rodents with BCG, known
formally as bacillus Calmette-Guerin, which has been used for 80 years as a
preventive for tuberculosis. It stimulated the production of another immune
component, called tumor necrosis factor or TNF, that kills the cells that
were attacking the pancreas.

Faustman's goal was simply to prevent the attack on islet cells of the
pancreas so that a new transplant could have a chance to take hold. To her
great surprise, however, the treated mice began producing insulin again -- a
finding that contradicted everything researchers believed about diabetes.
Eventually, however, other labs were able to replicate her results.

In subsequent papers, Faustman showed that the new insulin-secreting cells
were being produced by the spleen, a fist-sized organ that plays a crucial
role in recycling blood cells. First, she demonstrated that the cure of the
mice could be accelerated by injecting extra spleen cells into the animals.
Then she transplanted male spleens into female mice undergoing the treatment
and demonstrated that the insulin-producing cells were male in origin.

Very little research has been conducted in humans about what happens to
patients after their spleens have been removed for medical reasons. But
Faustman found two studies, one of British patients with pancreatitis and
one of children with beta-thalassemia, in which their spleens had been
removed. In both groups, many of the patients developed diabetes within five
years after their surgery. These findings suggest that the spleen plays a
key role in regulating glucose uptake.

Faustman had great difficulty obtaining research funds because her ideas
were so contrary to the prevailing wisdom. One person who believed in her,
however, was Lee A. Iacocca, the former chief of Chrysler Corp., whose wife
Mary died of diabetes. Iacocca wrote her a check for $1 million and by 2006,
his Iacocca Family Foundation had raised more than $11 million for her
research.

She is now gearing up for a larger, phase 2 clinical trial of the technique.
More information about her research can be obtained here
<http://www.faustmanlab.org>  and those interested in participating in the
trials can e-mail her at diabetestrial at partners.org. But be warned there is
already a long waiting list.

 

Click here to view this article <http://tribwww.gumiyo.com/k/XJdqgFG>  

-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: Untitled attachment 00004.txt
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/diabetes-talk_nfbnet.org/attachments/20110626/94e9a77d/attachment.txt>