London Diabetes Trial: Diabetes (1)

The development of MultiPepT1De, and the science behind it, has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and Diabetes UK.
The primary goal of the study is to assess the safety of the treatment, but researchers will also be looking at its effectiveness, including whether any protective effect continues after the injections have stopped.
Professor Peakman said laboratory and animal model research had produced promising results, and early studies in patients showed some potentially important immune and metabolic changes.
Jack Meaning, aged 29, an economist, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in October 2014. He was on a trial of an earlier, simpler version of the immunotherapy, MonoPepT1De, which has now been completed, although the results have yet to be published.

Protective response:
All the volunteers will receive six injections, four weeks apart.
In healthy people the immune system has a complex system of checks and balances to enable it to destroy harmful pathogens - but not healthy tissue. Part of the regulation is done by T regulatory cells, which suppress the immune response from attacking the body.
The injections contain peptides - small fragments of protein molecules found in the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.
It is hoped these will prompt T regulatory cells in the immune system to mount a protective response to the beta cells, so re-training the immune system.


The hormone insulin is used to control blood sugar levels.

Diabetes:
There are two main types of diabetes -

• Type 1 - where the pancreas does not produce any insulin
• Type 2 - where the pancreas does not produce enough insulin - or the body's cells do not react to insulin

Type 1 diabetes can develop at any age, but usually appears before the age of 40, particularly in childhood.
Around 10% of all diabetes is type 1, but it is the most common type of childhood diabetes, so it is sometimes called juvenile diabetes or early-onset diabetes
In type 2 diabetes, the body either fails to produce enough insulin to function properly, or the body's cells do not react to insulin. Around 90% of adults with diabetes have type 2, and it tends to develop later in life than type 1.

What is the future for diabetes treatment?

Could there be a future without diabetes? 

Dr Matthew Hobbs and Professor Roy Taylor discuss projects committed to improving the care and treatment of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and ultimately finding a cure:

There are few conditions that science has made such a fundamental impact on as Type 1 diabetes - the first use of insulin in the 1920s transformed it from a death sentence into something people can live with.

But even today, Type 1 diabetes typically involves a lifetime of daily injections and, on average, people with it die younger than the rest of the population. This is why we urgently need more research into the condition.

One of the most exciting areas of research is islet cell transplants. These involves taking the islet cells - the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin - from dead donors and putting them into people with Type 1 diabetes, whose own islet cells have stopped working.

Diabetes UK funded the UK's first 15 islet cell transplants. It is now available on the NHS and 34 people have benefited since 2005.

The treatment is very effective. However, there are still issues to solve. The transplanted cells only last for a few years; there is a very limited supply of cells; and it is difficult to stop the body rejecting them.

We are already funding research that will help to solve these issues. The results should make islet transplants more successful and available to more people in the next few years.

We are also funding research into the artificial pancreas, a combination of electronic devices that work together to monitor and adjust insulin levels, like the pancreas does in people without diabetes.

View full report here on BBC/Science