Artificial Pancreas Work Progresses in Human Trials

The University of Virginia has announced very positive results from their first round human trials of a closed loop artificial pancreas developed solely through  a computer simulation model rather than the traditional animal trials.

This is key for two main reasons:

1. The five patients that received the system that automatically monitors their blood glucose levels and adjusts it based upon a prescribed insulin delivery regime responded very well.  Great news for people like Shelby who someday hope to manage their Type I Diabetes with this type of device.
2. The Food and Drug Administration accepted the computer simulation in approving the human trials without requiring years of animal testing first.  This has tons of implications both for the animals involved (a long-standing ethical issue in all medical research) but also in terms of cost of research and the speed with which laboratory hypotheses can be proven and converted into beneficial tools for patients.

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Developing a 'closed loop' system, also called an artificial pancreas, is sort of the holy grail in the management of Type I Diabetes.

• It would eliminate the need for painful finger prick blood glucose testing.
• It also would eliminate the specter of dangerous overnight low blood glucose episodes, which can be particularly dangerous for patients who live by themselves.
• It allows blood glucose levels to be dialed in much more precisely within a 'normal' range thereby delaying or preventing devastating side impact of diabetes, such as liver and kidney damage, blindness and circulatory problems.

This research was funded in major part by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and coordinated globally by the Artificial Pancreas Consortium. 

Green Tea May Delay Type I Onset

The University of Georgia School of Dentistry discovered a correlation between an antioxidant present in green tea and the delayed onset of Type I Diabetes in mice genetically prone to the disease.  The discovery came while researchers were studying primarily another autoimmune disease - Sjogren's Syndrome, which affects the function of salvatory glands.

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The research is interesting and heartening, particularly because the green tea antioxidant EGCGwas introduced to the mice diluted in water, as it would commonly be administered by drinking tea.  It's also important because now we have knowledge about a commonly occurring compound that appears to have a positive impact on a disease that is very difficult to prevent and currently impossible to cure.

However, with several approaches to delaying the onset of Type I Diabetes, the study requires knowledge that the subject is prone to the disease.  This is the conundrum for researchers: how do you find human test subjects to move the research to the next level, or how do you apply it when you can't reliably predict natural onset of Type I Diabetes.

Researchers have identified genetic markers that indicate a predisposition to develop Type I Diabetes, but not everyone with it eventually develops the disease. Applying or even testing prophylactic treatments requires a fairly wide scale screening process of potential subjects, namely infants.  The double blind nature of scientific experimentation also means that some children will develop the disease while in the study, but how do you weed out those who never run into the unknown environmental links believed to trigger the genetic cascade into Type I Diabetes?

Thank you to the researchers at the University of Georgia for this important work.  It's another link in the ongoing work into discovering how natural compound can protect the human body from going haywire.  But EGCG is not a cure-all that will wipe out Type I by itself.  Stay tuned for more research in to the applications of this new knowledge.