| | | City of Hope researchers discover new potential cause of type 1 diabetes
cityofhope.org
February 27, 2017
Study results challenge traditional ideas about the source of this life-altering disease
DUARTE, Calif. — An international team of researchers led by City of Hope’s Bart Roep, Ph.D., the Chan Soon-Shiong Shapiro Distinguished Chair in Diabetes and professor/founding chair of the Department of Diabetes Immunology, has been able to justify an alternative theory about the cause of type 1 diabetes (T1D) through experimental work. The study results were published online today in the journal Nature Medicine.
T1D, previously known as juvenile diabetes, affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans and is the result of the loss of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. The prevailing belief was that the root cause of T1D was the immune system mistakenly identifying those insulin-secreting beta cells as a potential danger and, in turn, destroying them.
Now Roep, along with researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, have found a mechanism in which stressed beta cells are actually causing the immune response that leads to T1D.
“Our findings show that type 1 diabetes results from a mistake of the beta cell, not a mistake of the immune system,” said Roep, who is director of The Wanek Family Project for Type 1 Diabetes, which was recently created with gifts from the Wanek family and anonymous donors to support the institution’s goal of curing T1D in six years. “The immune system does what it is supposed to do, which is respond to distressed or 'unhappy' tissue, as it would in infection or cancer.”
Autoimmunity against a defective ribosomal insulin gene product in type 1 diabetes
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