New type 1 diabetes treatment involves immune system

The next phase of this research would be a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of the new therapy, the researchers said.

Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone, Professor in Metabolism and Endocrinology at the University of California said, “This could be a game-changer”.

However, people with Type 1 diabetes do not have enough T-reg cells to protect the pancreas, and so it is attacked and stops making enough insulin.

Around 14 patients from 18 to 43 years old, all with recent-onset T1D, were organised into four groups that successively received infusions containing greater numbers of Tregs: members of the first group received about 5 million cells, and the fourth group about 2.6 billion cells.

With daily insulin injections, even young children with Type 1 diabetes can obtain glucose from the bloodstream into the cells of the body.

T1D is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system, which normally defends against infections, targets insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas.

If you are a diabetes sufferer, this may be a good news for you. The number of persons diagnosed with diabetes worldwide is astounding, and for many the need to inject themselves with insulin is a daily chore necessary to keep their blood sugar levels under control. They said that T cells have the potential to dampen the immune system’s assault on beta cells while leaving its infection-fighting capabilities intact.

What the researchers did was to harvest T-regs from the body and then empower it to be 1,500 times stronger in potency, and then re-infused them back into the body where they rule out the need for daily insulin injection for up to one year. Phase 1 trials typically only examine if a drug or intervention is safe, they are not focused on effectiveness.

The infused Tregs used in the trial were derived from the trial participants’ own cells, using an ex vivo “isolation and expansion” technique.

It could also stop the disease from progressing, leading to organ damage, blindness and limb amputations.

A team of doctors and scientists from the University of California, San Francisco conducted the pioneer trial for a novel immunotherapy for the treatment of type 1 diabetes (T1D) in the United States.

A New Jersey-based company, called Caladrius Pharmaceuticals, is now in the early stages of planning a Phase II trial of T-regs following the successful Phase I trial findings. By further modifying the T-regs, they could be changed in order to protect other cells as well, in order for them to be applicable to other immune deficiency diseases such as Lupus or cardiovascular diseases.