Her team published its report July 30 in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We stopped the progression of automimmunity. The animals could become normoglycemic," meaning they had normal levels of blood sugar, Koulmanda said.
Another major discovery is that inflammation appears to play a major role in type 1 diabetes, she added. In fact, one drug used in the treatment regimen reduced the inflammation of cells that metabolize insulin.
"Basically, by blocking inflammation, we were getting the animals to be insulin-sensitive," Koulmanda said.
Another drug successfully reduced the autoimmune destruction of beta cells, but that was not the key to reversing the disease, she said. Instead, success was linked to blocking inflammatory processes that impair cells' responses to insulin.
Some of the cells involved in insulin metabolism were found to be resistant to insulin's effects -- a common phenomenon seen in much more common, adult-onset, obesity-linked type 2 diabetes, Koulmanda said. "This is the first time anyone has seen insulin-resistant cells in type 1 diabetes," she noted.
A course of treatment lasting less than four weeks restored normal blood sugar function in the test mice. In contrast, mice that did not get the treatment died during that month-long period.
Based on these promising results, the first work need to start a human trial of the regimen are about to begin, said Dr. Terry B. Strom, director of the Transplant Research Center.
"We have tried something like this for monkey models," he said. "The results have been very good." |
