New research, published on-line at Diabetologia and funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has shown that people with type 1 diabetes do still attempt to replenish their own insulin producing beta cells after diagnosis.
Researchers say that this suggests, in the future, an intervention might be devised which could allow such patients to renew their own capacity to produce insulin.
Researchers from the Peninsula Medical School, working in collaboration with colleagues from Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the University of Brighton, used a unique collection of pancreas specimens taken from patients who died soon after diagnosis of type 1 diabetes to show that they respond to the ongoing process of destruction by inducing their islet cells to proliferate.
Until now, it has been generally believed that, in humans, beta cells divide only very infrequently after the first year or so of life and that they do not readily proliferate once type 1 diabetes is diagnosed.
This current study presents evidence that there is a 10-fold increase in islet cell replication in patients recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The factors that trigger the replication process in patients with type 1 diabetes are still unclear, although the study suggests that an immune mediator is likely to be involved.
The results of the research offer the hope that, in future, it might be possible to encourage a newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes patient’s own beta cells to reproduce as a means of replacing those being destroyed by the disease. The development of such a therapy could mean that some patients with type 1 diabetes would be able to produce their own insulin for a longer period, thereby reducing the need for pharmaceutical interventions.
Professor Noel Morgan, Director of the Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at the Peninsula Medical School, commented, ‘Our findings are significant because they challenge current thinking and offer the hope that, at some point in the future, a therapy could be developed that would allow individuals who are developing type 1 diabetes to retain their own insulin. We are a long way from this point, but the first steps have been taken with this research.’