on the news tonight they reported on a possible cure for type on diabetes. here is the article that was reported.
https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2017/11/16/boston-childrens-reverses-type-1-diabetes-in-mice.html
I believe that Denise Faustman cured diabetes in mice several years back. She is now conducting phase II trials in humans. And because her treatment involves medication that is already approved for other uses, the path to regulatory approval should be shorter.
I’m always happy to see new research being conducted on diabetes cures, but I am not hopeful that this new research will lead to that in the next 10 years.
i just thought the article was interesting and to me hopeful. i didnt know that denise faustman did a trial. i know that she was working on it. but didnt know that she started trials. so even if it does involve medication it still isnt a cure per se. and with the next 10 years it may be shorter depending on how successful the trials are on humans once it gets there. or there may be another doctor that may find another way to cure it while this is going on
Even at its best, this treatment would only halt the development of type 1 diabetes in newly-diagnosed patients, since we already know from the thousands of cases in which patients with established type 1 diabetes have had their immune systems suppressed to allow for organ transplants, the beta cells of the pancreas, once they have been destroyed by the patient’s autoimmunity, do not regenerate. Dr. Faustman looked around for a while for something that would induce the beta cells to regrow once the autoimmune attack was stopped, and she tried spleen cells and the INGAP polypeptide, but nothing achieved clinically significant results, and after thirty years of work she still has no useful results.
Even if this was something that could be useful for established cases of type 1 diabetes, mice are so extremely easy to cure of type 1 diabetes that they provide a very poor model of the disease in humans, so we can fairly safely assume that what works in mice will not work in humans. I think the guinea pig, which shares with humans the unusual inability to make its own vitamin C, would be a better model to use, but still, nowadays mice are the new ‘guinea pigs.’
Seydlitz,
I think you are wrong on Dr. Faustman’s work.
BCG will give more TNF which Type 1’s are lacking.
Visit Faustmanlab.com for further reading on BCG and diabetes.
She has also has written a book The Value of BCG and TNF in Autoimmunity.
Major Findings from the Phase I Trial
The major findings from the Phase I study were:
• The BCG vaccine with multi-dosing was safe in advanced type 1 diabetes.
• Although the drug was given in relatively small doses, we saw targeted death of the “bad” T cells that attack the insulin-secreting islets, an early sign that BCG has the potential to stop the autoimmune attack and successfully reverse disease.
• In people living with diabetes for an average of 15 years, there was a transient increase in/restoration of pancreatic insulin secretion after BCG vaccination.
The problem is that BCG vaccine has been around for decades and was used extensively to combat tuberculosis, which used to be a major complication of diabetes. So thousands of diabetics have been exposed through this route to BCG treatment, but not a single case of diabetes being cured through this process has ever been reported. BCG is also used to treat bladder cancer, and no doubt many patients treated with it for this reason have also been diabetics, but again, there has never been a single clinically significant result reported from BCG for diabetes. BCG also has its own negative side-effects.
The most Faustman has been able to achieve by partially suspending the autoimmune attack on the beta cells of diabetics is that there has been a clinically insignificant, transient rise in c-peptide, indicating that some miniscule amounts of insulin are being produced. Keep in mind that she was delayed for many years in beginning her research since she wanted to develop a supersensitive device to measure c-peptide far below normal levels, so that is the kind of minimal result she is detecting with her work.
If someone burns off your finger with a torch, it is not going to grow back if you only take the torch away. Humans are not like chameleons, who can regrow a severed tail. We see this in patients taking immunosuppressive drugs, which cause gum overgrowth, but this overgrowth does not occur at all in those patients who begin to take immunosuppressives after their gums have severely receded, since the residual tissue is too diminished to be re-stimulated. The same principle applies to beta cells.
Faustman is now conducting a study, due to be concluded in 2020, to see if any more significant result can be produced with this treatment. From all the facts I’ve cited, I would guess there won’t be any.