Antibodies Counter Diabetes
Quick strikes against wayward immune cells
By Ben Harder
Transplant surgeon Takashi Maki once put people with diabetes under the knife. Then and now, some diabetic patients get a new pancreas, full of insulin-producing cells, to replace similar cells that their bodies have destroyed. While pancreas transplantation is still used in some cases of type 1 diabetes, it’s neither widely available nor consistently successful, says Maki.
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The Harvard Medical School researcher no longer operates on diabetic patients, but he has high expectations for a drug that he previously gave them after transplants. That drug, made up of immune-suppressing antibodies, discourages rejection of transplanted organs. Such antibodies, it turns out, may on their own stall the runaway autoimmunity that is the core cause of type 1 diabetes. That, in turn, could preserve some of a person’s capacity to produce insulin.