It has taken scientists at the University of Miami's Diabetes Research Institute eight long years of painstaking research, but they believe they have finally pinned down Insulin, the hormone most closely linked to diabetes, to be the cause of the inherited form of the blood sugar disease.
The body's immune T-cells, for reasons that remain unclear, in patients with type 1 diabetes, react against insulin-producing cells in the pancreas shutting them down, which triggers the onset of the disease. The researchers believe that insulin is the prime antigen, immune system target, responsible for this shutdown.
Lead researcher Dr. David A. Hafler, Breakstone professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School says in the end, it was a very simple answer.
He says many studies done in science are complex, but in this case, they had a breakthrough.
Motivated by the findings, other researchers are already testing out insulin as the basis of a possible vaccine against type 1 diabetes.
According to the American Diabetes Association almost 16 million diabetic Americans have the type 1 form of the disease, the vast majority of diabetics suffer from type 2 diabetes, where other factors such as increasing weight gain gradually desensitize the body's cells to the effects of insulin.
Scientists already knew that type 1 diabetes is caused by the body's immune system turning against cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, but were unclear what the target for this immune response was. Hafler says it now seems that questioning ' what is the antigen', is such an obvious question.
He says the only way to properly answer that question in humans is to examine almost inaccessible pancreatic lymph tissues, which took them years to get, to clone the cells and then to characterize them and examine their activity. But the effort paid off, and is supported by evidence from other studies.
Dr. Jay Skyler, associate director of the Diabetes Research Institute says in his view the study provides the last piece of evidence in humans and is really very important.
He says it resolves a controversy which has been going on for 15 years because, based on animal models, there had been considerable debate as to whether the primary antigen for type 1 diabetes is insulin or glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), which though it might still play some role in type 1 disease, insulin appears to be the real culprit.