A Boston scientist is making headlines with a diabetic trial claiming to have the potential to cure Type 1 diabetes – and a family near Perth is one of many participating in the research.
When 11-year-old Oliver Matthews-Hanna was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2008, his parents, Christa Matthews and Steve Hanna, were determined that his diagnosis not be a lifelong sentence. They immediately began researching diabetes in the hopes that a cure for this life-altering illness would be found sooner rather than later.
They soon learned of the revolutionary research of Dr. Denise Faustman, a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“All her findings made sense to us,” Matthews said, “Dr. Faustman was working toward a cure when it seemed like everyone else was working toward maintenance.”
In 2010 and again this year, Oliver and his family joined the ranks of many other Canadians and travelled to Boston to donate Oliver’s blood to aid in Faustman’s research. The family paid their own travel expenses.
Type 1 diabetes (also called juvenile diabetes) is an autoimmune disorder where insulin producing cells in the pancreas are destroyed, resulting in an insulin deficiency. As a result, diabetics must take daily insulin injections to regulate blood sugar levels.
In Oliver’s case, he receives insulin injections with every meal and any time his blood sugar is elevated, totalling four or more injections each day.
“You are puncturing yourself several times a day, and feeling guilty about eating food,” Hanna explained. “Even worse, you never get a day off from it, it’s something you have to think about 24/7.”
“There’s no vacation from diabetes,” Matthews added.
The are financial costs as well. There are expenses for insulin and syringes and blood testing, which must be done four to six times a day, costs roughly a dollar each time.
Faustman’s research is innovative in that it challenges traditionally accepted views of how diabetes works within the body. Faustman’s hypothesis is that if the autoimmune disorder causing diabetes can be halted, the pancreas will regenerate and resume its normal function.
In support of her hypothesis, Faustman searched for a mechanism to stop the autoimmune response, and settled on bacillus CalmetteGuerin, better known as BCG. In use for over 80 years, BCG is a generic drug that has been administered to more than four billion people for tuberculosis prevention and bladder cancer therapy. BCG causes the body to make a natural substance called TNF that helps regulate the immune system.
In 2008, Faustman launched Phase 1 of a clinical trial to investigate the efficacy of BCG as a cure for Type 1 diabetes. The trial will include four phases of testing and could take eight to 10 years to reach completion.
At a meeting of the 2011 American Diabetes Association, Faustman presented results from the Phase 1 human clinical trial, which showed the potential for BCG treatments to turn the pancreas “back on” briefly, even in people who have had Type 1 diabetes for many years.
