NBC nightly news with Brian Williams tonight talked about using 2 drugs currently approved (and used) to treat cancer that have been successful in putting diabetic mice into a sort of "remission" from diabetes. It mentioned the fact that the drugs already being FDA approved speeds up the process so much and the piece closed with a statement about it possibly providing a cure "in one year."
Thoughts? Anyone heard more? Exciting, but hard to not be skeptical...
I just saw it on their website (it's under the health tab).
I doubt we'll see anything in 1 year because that just sounds too good to be true. I am cautiously optimistic about this study and others. I think Dr. Faustman's study in Harvard has recently moved to trials with humans. I'm also hoping the federal ban on funding stem cell research will be lifted come January.
in those cases you can't listen to the news. Every breakthrough isn't always exactly accurate.
i'm kind of like you, until i see the actual happening, otherwise i feel it is like The National Enquirer telling me the newest on Brangelina.
I think it's exciting. I'm glad there are so many avenues being examined right now.
I was really excited when I heard about it. Although I asked my endo about it and he thought that the cure in the mice could also be suspicious because it may have cured diabetes in mice that were still in an early period of diabetes diagnosis (the honeymoon period). A part of me also wonders what happenes to your kidneys (or other systems) when a non-cancer patient takes not only one but two cancer drugs...
The news is still really exciting though!
I saw this article online today (my husband emailed it to me). It's an interesting concept, if it works, though I wouldn't want to be the first guinea pig!
A cure? Promising findings, but not quite. It's still early in the game - with experiments being done on mouse models. Two drugs used to fight cancer, Gleevec and Sutent have been found to disrupt the autoimmune response in pre-diabetic mice and to sometimes reverse it in mice with type 1 diabetes.
It's a cool finding and hopefully we can fund more research to see if this is a path that can work on people. But it's only the beginning. Hopefully, sensationalist coverage like that done by NBC won't trick people into thinking the cure is already here and that we can stop supporting important diabetes research to turn these discoveries into clinical treatments.
Here's the link to a full story on the study:
http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2008/11/18/cancer-drugs-may-treat-type-1-diabetes.html
love you!! and no haven't heard anything unless you have and didn't tell me anything!
Any new news?
Regardless of whether this treatment will end up working or not. Its good to know that people are working 24/7 in trying to find a cure for us. That keeps the morale up.
How does that work since our pancreases don't produce ANY insulin?
Hmmm...I think I sense some sarcasm?? Or maybe it's just in my head....
Were the two drugs Gleevec and Sutent? I read a study about them as being possible leads to regress diabetes within the last year. A quick literature search shows that research has investigated at least Gleevec's usage in treating diabetes since 2005.
well, a while back they said they had a cure in canada, and like 500 kids were cure, but ufortunatly, many of them died a few months later of kidney faluire. until we are 100% sure it won't kill you i will not believe it!
These two drugs are metabolized by the liver, and excreted in the bile and feces. This means that they won't affect your kidneys. You are right in thinking that the drug cured diabetic mice in the honeymoon period. The most common mouse model used in diabetes research is "given" diabetes by injecting streptozotocin. They don't have antibodies attacking their islet cells like human T1 diabetics do.
The latest research that I have seen involved producing islet cells from stem cells (and engineering them so they don't have the that doesn't have the "diabetes inducing" HLA haplotypes), killing your immune system with full body irradiation, getting a bone marrow transplant from a matching donor, and then transplanting the new and improved islet cells. This would lead to a healthy immune system, insulin production, etc. This is the most exciting research, and hope to see this become a treatment modality in the next 20 years.