Millions of people with type 1 diabetes depend on daily insulin injections to survive. They would die without the shots because their immune system attacks the very insulin-producing cells it was designed to protect.
Now, a University of Missouri scientist, Habib Zaghouani, PhD, has discovered this attack also damages blood vessels that supply the insulin-producing cells. The revelation is leading to a potential treatment that combines adult stem cells with a promising new drug. Zaghouani is pursuing a patent for this new treatment and hopes to translate his discovery from use in mice to humans. Continuous funding would allow his work to progress to this next stage of development.
“This is extremely exciting for our research team,” Zaghouani said. “Our discovery about the importance of restoring blood vessels has the potential to be applied not only to type 1 diabetes but also a number of other autoimmune diseases.”