CU makes breakthrough in type 1 diabetes

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 16, 2007 at midnight

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University of Colorado researchers have discovered an anti-body in human blood that can predict who is predisposed to type 1 diabetes, a breakthrough that could lead to the elimination of the disease.

"This is incredibly exciting for us," said John Hutton, research director at the Barbara Davis Center in Denver and a researcher at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. He said it's the first new diabetes target discovered in a decade.

Type 1 diabetes, previously called childhood diabetes, develops when the immune system mistakenly targets the pancreas, killing cells that make insulin.

Three antibodies previously discovered, when examined in a blood test, can predict diabetes with 90 percent certainty.

This new discovery, of the ZnT8 auto-antibody, raises the accuracy level to 96 percent.

Hutton believes the ZnT8 breakthrough quickly will become routine as a diagnostic tool in all clinical studies.

"Ultimately, we'd like to be able to prevent diabetes from occurring in the first place," Hutton said. That could happen by using ZnT8 itself as a therapy.

Researchers analyzed blood from children who had been studied from birth to the onset of the disease. Hundreds of newly diagnosed patients also were studied, as were members of a control group that had no known risk for diabetes.

Seventy percent of diabetics tested positive for the antibody, while less than 1 percent of those in the control group did.

In some kids, the immune system can start attacking the pancreas at age of 1, but, typically, the disease isn't discovered until three to 15 years later, by which time multitudes of antibodies are wreaking destruction.

Currently, there is no safe form of therapy, Hutton noted. Drugs that can squelch the immune system, knocking out proteins that attack the pancreas, also harm the kidneys.

Hutton said he is hopeful that ZnT8 and other newly discovered antibodies can lead to safer therapies.

Animals injected with one dose of some experimental therapies have lifetime immunity from diabetes, he said.

It could be trickier with humans, but the ideal approach would be to give kids as young as 1 or 2 a safe dose, then monitor them every six months with a simple blood test. The hope would be that no antibodies to diabetes are found. If they are, then another therapeutic dose would be tried.

The CU researchers used a microarray, which is a small microscope slide that has the entire human genome on 50,000 spots scattered over a square inch of glass.

The findings will be posted online this week and published in next week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Figures on diabetes

• 14 million Americans are afflicted; more than 2 million of them have its most severe form, childhood diabetes (also called type 1).

• 162,000 people die each year from diabetes, making it the fourth-leading cause of death.

• 665,000 new cases of diabetes are diagnosed annually.

• It's the No. 1 cause of new cases of blindness in people between 20 and 70 years of age.Source: Barbara Davis Center For Childhood Diabetes

scanlon@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2897

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