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Wednesday June 27 12:35 AM ET

Diabetes Cure in Mice Offers Hope for Humans-Study

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A simple 40-day treatment that cures type 1 diabetes in laboratory mice might offer hope for humans with the disease, scientists said in a report out on Wednesday.

About 1 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes because it is often diagnosed in children.

In type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce insulin, which is needed to convert sugar into fuel and is normally produced in the pancreas in cells called islet cells. In people with type 1 diabetes, the islet cells are destroyed by the body's own misguided immune cells and sugar builds up dangerously in the blood.

In research reported in the July issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, mice with this kind of autoimmune diabetes were treated for 40 days to re-train their immune systems not to mistakenly attack islet cells.

This was done in two steps. First, the researchers triggered a naturally occurring drug called TNF-alpha that killed the rogue immune cells.

They also injected the mice with donor cells that re-educated their immune systems so that they would accept islet cells and not destroy them.

INSULIN-PRODUCING CELLS RE-GROW

This was encouraging enough, but what surprised the researchers was that the insulin-producing cells appeared to re-grow in the diseased mice, providing enough so that their blood sugar came back to normal.

Up to 75 percent of the mice stayed healthy for 100 days or more after that, without any further treatment, according to Dr. Denise Faustman of Massachusetts General Hospital, who wrote the study.

``It's really a permanent reversal of an established autoimmune disease, and if that's not as good as it gets, the next thing that happens is the islets regenerate in the pancreas,'' Faustman said in a telephone interview.

Clearly enthusiastic about implications for treating type 1 diabetes in people, Faustman said the main obstacle to human clinical trials was funding: ``If we had money to produce the drug and do the treatment, we'd be in clinical trials within a year.''

Dr. David Nathan, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital, was cautiously optimistic.

``This represents a very new discovery in an animal model of type 1 diabetes that has always been used to predict what happens in human diabetes,'' Nathan said by telephone.

``However until we explore more thoroughly whether the same phenomenon that occurs in mice occurs in human diabetes, we have to be cautious about the potential meaning of these findings ... whether this may represent the first insight in how to cure type 1 diabetes,'' he said.

Dr. Gerald Bernstein, an endocrinologist affiliated with the American Diabetes Association, was encouraged by the research.

``I'm optimistic about the concept, about application (to humans) if you can find people at the right time,'' Bernstein said by telephone from the association's scientific meeting in Philadelphia.

He added that this therapy would also have to be integrated with screening to see which people were the best candidates.

-- (Possible@good.news), June 27, 2001