Mar 16, 2010

Rebooting the Immune System to Cure Diabetes?

Featured in this months PopSci
The ability to reprogram the immune system is one of the most sought-after goals in medicine.
Now researchers are closer than ever to pulling it off in patients with Type 1 diabetes...
ImmuneHeader.jpg

Bluestone's drug is what is known as an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody.
The success of anti-CD3 represented the first one-time treatment with minimal side effects that had been shown to stop the progression of Type 1 diabetes in humans.

.... "People finally saw that it was actually possible to make a change to the course of the disease without having to use really toxic immunosuppression," he says. "Sometimes you don't know whether something is going to work until you try it, and then when it finally does, you've got a road map that other people can also use."

Please read full at PopSci