Search This Blog

Friday, July 17, 2009

Therapy for Cancer and Arthritis May Be Good as Diabetes Treatment

Researchers for Yale School of Medicine report that an antibody used for treatment of some cancers and arthritis seem to holdup type 1 diabetes when they tried it on mice. They say that even after stopping the administration of the antibody, it continues to be of benefit.

They say that rituximab, the antibody they used, reduces the B cells. There is evidence that B cells have a part in autoimmune disease by interrelating with the immune system's T cells. The T cells are the ones that destroy the cells that produce insulin.

Li Wen, the division of endocrinology's senior research scientist, said that after successfully depleting the B cells, regulatory cells come out which can hold back the autoimmune and inflammatory reaction even after the return of the B cells. Li Wen and team were stunned by the fact that there were both T and B cells in the regulatory cells.

What Li Wen and her Yale collaborator, Mark Shlomchik, M.D. did to find out whether the depletion of the B cells would be a treatment for type 1 diabetes, was develop a mouse model. They engineered these mice to be predisposed to diabetes and put the molecule retuximab on surface of the B cells of these mice.

The investigators found that the drug therapy considerably delayed diabetes by 10 to 15 weeks than their mice counterparts which were treated with a placebo. This translates to about 10 to 15 years in humans. Five of the 14 mice who had already diabetes stopped requiring insulin for two to five months while their counterparts stayed being diabetic. So it has some promise as a form of diabetes treatment.


What does this mean? Shlomchik said that it looks like the B cells play two parts in diabetes and perhaps in other autoimmune disease as well. At the start the B cells may encourage the disease to appear but after depletion with rituximab, they stop the disease. This shows there may be no need for multiple medications to further deplete the B cells.

I hope they will continue on with this research but in my search for new development, I didn't find any. However, this did not diminish my admiration for the researchers for I have no idea nor want to find out how to engineer mice to be susceptible to diabetes. Why, I did not even do well at my chemistry class in the university and I am terrified of mice. So despite my overwhelming desire to help the diabetics, I will not go near those creatures. I draw the line there, so sorry guys!

No comments: