UK Scientists May Soon Cure Type 1 Diabetes with New Vaccine

UK Scientists May Soon Cure Type 1 Diabetes with New Vaccine, after the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approves it.

The new research will cost a staggering 4.4 million pounds and it is expected to come up with satisfactory results in developing a new vaccine that would be able to cure Type 1 diabetes.

The funds for this new research come from various sources, such as Diabetes UK, Tesco and JDRF.

The vaccine is expected to target high risk of diabetes development patients, to prevent and also to delay the onset of the disease. If it will succeed in doing so, it will be the first line of defense for patients.

Yet patients will have another 10 years of wait-time until the first vaccine comes out on the market. But the good news is that trials are already active and are now carried in the United Kingdom’s hospitals, under the close supervision of Professor Colin Dayan from Cardiff University.

Diabetes, the lifestyle disease as it was dubbed, affects millions of people across the globe. If the vaccine will prove to be successful patients will then benefit from the much hoped relief of painful routine of insulin shots or, for the patients with affected kidneys by the disease, the relief of constant dialysis.

Looking at statistics, a child affected by the disease endures, by the time he reaches the age of 18, approximately 50,000 insulin shots. if the vaccine works the future generation will be speared the dread of the annoying needle.

The future diabetes vaccine had as a background another vaccine, the one for a common tuberculosis. The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine, as it is known, has been showing potential not only in reversing the diabetes symptoms but also in curing or at least preventing some other diseases of the immune system.

The pancreas in patients with diabetes is damaged by the so called T cells, which are normally beneficial in fighting infection and disease. Because the pancreas produces the insulin, a damaged one will obviously not be able to maintain this function.

So, it goes without saying, that without the vital insulin the body cannot process the food to transform it into energy, the result being the rise of sugar levels in the blood. The body’s response to high levels of sugar is creating grave complications such as kidney failure or even blindness.

So the breakthrough discovery made by British scientists is that the the increased levels of TNF, which is the hormone responsible for killing tuberculosis bacterium, also targets and kill the T cells which damage the pancreas.

Small tests have been already introduced by the director of the Immunobiology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, Denise Faustman, who used the vaccine on mice with diabetes. The results are promising and they show that the T cells were dramatically destroyed by the tuberculosis vaccine.

And not only this. More good news come from the fact that the same vaccine managed to even raise the levels of insulin in some of them.
The next 10 years will surely be used to make the Type 1 diabetes vaccine real, and this could change the medical condition of millions of people.
Image Source: SilverStarUK