Type-1 Diabetes Cured In Mice: December 2011

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

heparan sulfate by Simeonovic at The Australian National University

Quotes:

Scientists suggest that either boosting pancreatic islet levels of heparan sulfate (HS) or administering an inhibitor of the heparanase enzyme that is responsible for its breakdown could provide a new approach to preventing development or slowing progression of type 1 diabetes. A team at The Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research initially showed that HS is expressed at very high levels in the mouse islet and is essential for β-cell survival.

Charmaine J. Simeonovic, M.D., and colleagues, report their findings in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, in a paper titled “Heparan sulfate and heparanase play key roles in mouse β cell survival and autoimmune diabetes.”

Critically, treating prediabetic female MOD mice using PI-88, at an age when they were expected to exhibit both NDI and DI, significantly slowed the development of T1D by 10 weeks. By age 36 weeks, the number of diabetic mice among the PI-88 cohort was just half that of the control group.

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/researchers-find-approach-to-hold-type-1-diabetes-back/81246103/

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

What is in This Blog?

My goal, starting in 2012, (and including as much before then as possible) is to have a blog entry for every treatment reported to have cured type-1 diabetes in NOD mice, or any other animal.

Each entry in this blog is a report of one cure for type-1 diabetes in an animal.

Each title will be of the form TREATMENT by DOCTOR at RESEARCH INSTITUTION.

Each entry will have the date the cure was reported, one or more links to news reports, press releases, or research papers, and maybe a paragraph on the cure.

But I don't plan to put much analysis or discussion in these blog entries. I'm leaving comments open for now, but I really only want comments to note when one of these cures moves to a later stage of research.

Why This Blog?

This blog exists because of frustration. My frustration at constantly hearing that type-1 diabetes had been cured in mice (again), but never hearing that it was cured in people.

My way of dealing with this frustration is to try to keep track of the number of times people cure type-1 diabetes in animals. After all the first step to understanding something, is to catalog it. You can think of this blog as raw material for future research into type-1 cures in mice.

At the very least, this blog will help the entire type-1 diabetes research community keep track of how many mice cures are developed each year, what happens to them, and how long it takes to happen. I hope that the data found will fuel other types of "research into research" on type-1 diabetes.

About Animal Experiments

Things to remember about experiments on animals (sometimes called "pre-clinical trials"):

* Most research is not successful.

* New research done in animals is at least 10-15 years away from general availability to people.

* Most research done in animals never progresses to people.

* Although NOD mice are generally considered the best animal model of type-1 diabetes, they differ from people with type-1 in many ways.

* Recently we have cured type-1 diabetes in animals many times each year, but so far, none of those cures has turned into a cure for people.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

heparan sulfate by Simeonovic at The Australian National University

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Encapsulated Beta Cells by Nuvilex at SG Austria