Researchers from Seattle and Sweden team up to fight diabetes

October 25, 2008 | By More

Researchers from Seattle and Sweden met in Seattle last weekend to discuss the latest diabetes research

The annual Seattle-Sweden conferences are designed to highlight a number of collaborative projects between diabetes researchers working here and in Sweden.

This year’s conference, the 3rd Annual Seattle-Sweden Diabetes Awareness Day, was organized by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in collaboration with other Seattle and Swedish research organizations with the help of the Consulate General of Sweden in Los Angeles.

Both Seattle and Sweden share a surprisingly high rates of diabetes.

A highlight of the conference was a study that indicates that a vaccine might be able to help protectinsulin-producing cells—the beta cells of the pancreas—that are destroyed in type 1 diabetes.

Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile-onset diabetes, is an autoimmune disease and occurs when the  immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the pancreas’s insulin-producing beta cells.

As these cells are slowly destroyed, the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin gradually declines.

Eventually, the pancreas is no longer able to produce enough insulin to control blood sugar, leading to diabetes.

The blood of most people with type 1 diabetes contains immune proteins, called antibodies, that target proteins on the surface of the insulin-producing beta cells.

One of these autoantibodies targets is a protein called Glutamic Acid Decarboxylase-1 (GAD-1).

In the new study, researchers found that a vaccine against GAD-1 slows the decline of the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin, suggesting the vaccine was slowing the destruction of the beta cells.

The study will be appeared in the October 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and is already available online on the journal’s website.

Dr Johnny Ludvigsson, professor of Pediatrics at Linköping University and the lead author of the study, discussed the study’s results at the Seattle conference.

Ludvigsson is a long-time collaborator with Åke Lernmark, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington who was on of the first researchers to study GAD-based vaccines to treat type 1 diabetes.

The study was supported by grants from Diamyd Medical, which is developing the new vaccine, and the Swedish Child Diabetes Foundation.

Intuitively, one would think giving a vaccine against a beta cell protein would stimulate the immune system to attack the beta cells more aggressively, but what the vaccine appears to do is shift immune system into a less aggressive and less destructive mode.

Although the study’s results are promising, the researchers noted that the vaccine only slowed the decline of insulin production and did not reduce the patients need for insulin.

The hope, however, is that by giving the vaccine earlier or with different dosage schedules the vaccine will be more effective.

Trials to see if these approaches will work are now starting up in the U.S and Europe. 

In the U.S.A., researchers are enrolling patients 16-20 years of age with new onset type 1 diabetes. To be eligible participants must enroll within three months of being diagnosed with diabetes.

For more information go to ClinicalTrials.gov, which provides details about this trial and other clinical trials involving the Diamyd vaccine.

We will be filing additional reports about other local and national research projects discussed at the Seattle-Sweden conference in the coming days.

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Category: Child & Youth Health, Drugs & Medicines, Endocrine, Immune System

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