Finding a drug to prevent type 1 diabetes.

American scientists have been studying a drug that can inhibit the development of type 1 diabetes in mice. They hope it will have a similar effect on humans.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that is commonly diagnosed in children and adolescents. It develops when the body's immune cells begin attacking the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, requiring patients to inject insulin regularly to compensate.

Although scientists understand the process by which beta cells are attacked, they are unsure of the reason why this phenomenon occurs.

The pancreas consists of small groups of cells called islets that function to produce a range of hormones, and scientists at Stanford University decided to study why, in the early stages of diabetes, the immune system only attacks the cells that produce insulin.

Scientists are researching this drug in the hope that it will have a similar effect on humans. Source: Andrey Popov/Shutterstock.com

“Only beta cells are destroyed when a patient has type 1 diabetes,” said Paul Bollyky, one of the researchers at Stanford University, in a press release. “But we know that in the early stages, when symptoms are not yet apparent, the islets in the pancreas become inflamed, meaning that immune cells have found a way to invade these islets.”

By the time patients begin to experience the typical symptoms of type 1 diabetes, 90% of their pancreatic beta cells have already been completely destroyed. “We still don’t know why immune cells invade the pancreatic islets or what makes these cells so active,” Bollyky said.

Because the pancreas is a very difficult gland to study, the only way scientists can do so is by examining pancreases donated by diabetic patients after their death. Bollyky and his colleagues studied pancreases donated by type 1 diabetic patients to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

These people died shortly after being diagnosed with the disease, so scientists were able to see what happened in the early stages of the illness.

Researchers found that the pancreases of these patients accumulated a large amount of hyaluronic acid around the beta cells, something that was absent in patients with chronic diabetes.

This is clearly not a surprising finding, as patients with long-standing diabetes have lost beta cells over a long period; however, this is the first time scientists have observed a link between type 1 diabetes and changes in the extracellular matrix.

Scientists suspect that the accumulation of hyaluronic acid is what causes immune cells to damage the pancreas even more.

Loren Grush wrote in The Verge, "Hyaluronic acid causes the pancreas to swell because it traps water, causing fluid buildup and worsening inflammation by suppressing T cells—cells that regulate the body and maintain control of the immune system."

Scientists need to find a way to prevent the buildup of hyaluronic acid so that T cells can function normally. “We wanted to know what would happen if the buildup of the acid was prevented, and we’ve found a drug that can do this,” Bollyky stated in a press release.

It's an inexpensive medication called Hymecromone, also known as 4-methylumbelliferone (4-MU), which has been used in many countries to treat gallstone spasms for decades. Hymecromone is considered extremely safe and is approved for use in children in Europe.

Researchers tested the drug on genetically modified mice that had type 1 diabetes. They found that when hyaluronic acid didn't accumulate, T cells were freed and the immune system's destruction of beta cells was minimized. Beta cells were completely destroyed in the mice that didn't receive the drug, but remained intact in the others.

The next step in the research is to find out if similar reactions occur in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Stanford University funded this research hoping to obtain positive results so that doctors could screen patients at risk earlier and prescribe a drug to prevent the disease from progressing.

The research findings have been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

According to Alobacsi.vn