| Immune therapy stops diabetes in mouse study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using one type of immune system cell to
turn off another stopped type-1 diabetes in mice, U.S. researchers
said on Monday.
The study suggests it may be possible to retrain a faulty immune
system, stopping it from attacking the pancreas and causing type-1
or juvenile diabetes, the researchers said.
Writing in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Kristin Tarbell
and colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York said they used
immune system cells called dendritic cells to stimulate production
of suppressor T-cells.
These T-cells turn off the body's faulty immune response. In the
case of the mice, they stopped the destruction of their pancreatic
islet cells that causes type-1 diabetes.
Type-1 or juvenile diabetes is an autoimmune disease, caused when
immune cells for unknown reasons destroy healthy tissue. In diabetes,
they kill off the cells in the pancreas that make insulin.
An estimated 2 million Americans have type-1 diabetes.
"You have to stop the immune system from attacking those pancreatic
islet cells," Tarbell said in a statement
"Instead of silencing the attackers directly, we learned how
to generate another type of cell, called a regulatory or suppressor
cell, which essentially turns off the attackers," Tarbell added.
What works in mice may not necessarily work in people, the researchers
caution.
But the immune systems are highly similar.
Dendritic cells signal to T-cells, helping them identify which
invaders to attack and which to tolerate.
For their study, the Rockefeller team removed suppressor T-cells
from the mice, grew more of them in lab dishes, and injected them
back into the mice. They also purified the compounds used by dendritic
cells to signal the T-cells and used them to make the suppressor-T-cells
proliferate.
For the method to work, diabetes will have to be diagnosed very
early, Tarbell noted.
"If this method for restoring the balance of suppressor T-cells
proves effective all the way through our research and into humans,
we still need to intervene before the islet cells are completely
destroyed," Tarbell said.
"Measuring early onset will be just as important as treating
it."
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