Scientists Hold Out Hope for Diabetes Cure
Published: March 24, 2006
Three groups of scientists report today that they independently replicated a controversial finding: Severely diabetic mice can recover on their own if researchers squelch an immune system attack that is causing the disease.
It is a discovery that was first published in 2001 and raised the hopes of people with Type 1 diabetes, which usually occurs in puberty and afflicts an estimated half-million to a million Americans.
If the findings applied to humans, they might mean reversing a disease that had seemed incurable.
The report several years ago, by Dr. Denise Faustman of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, that the pancreas might cure itself, at least in mice, was met with skepticism.
“People just didn’t believe it,” said Dr. David Nathan, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General and a longtime supporter of Faustman’s. “People said you can’t cure diabetes.”
But, Nathan added, “this shows that at least in mice it has been confirmed and reconfirmed and confirmed again.”
The three new papers, by researchers at the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvard’s Joslin Clinic are published today in Science.
The different groups calculated their cure rates in different ways but all reported that a significant proportion, though less than half of the mice, were cured.
In Faustman’s experiments, 67 percent of the mice were cured.
Dr. John Buse, director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina, urged caution.
“There are two possibilities,” Buse said. “This treatment works for mice but no derivation of it will ever work for humans. Or this is the paradigm leap that is necessary to find the cure for Type 1 diabetes.”
“If I was a betting person, my guess is that it probably won’t work in humans,” Buse added, explaining that all too often in science what works in mice does not work in people.
And despite their success in curing some of the mice, the three groups of researchers could not confirm another of Faustman’s findings, published in Science in 2003. There, she reported that the new insulin-secreting cells came from the spleen.
Faustman added that she could boost the animal’s response to her treatment by giving them extra spleen cells, although, she said, the extra cells were not necessary to cure the mice. Just stopping the immune system attack was sufficient, she said.
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