Trials for Type 1 Diabetes Cure

An anonymous reader writes "According to this New York Times article, the pharmaceutical companies and NIH are shunning research for a cure for Type 1 diabetes. There's no money in a cure using medicine with an expired patent. Dr Faustman (researcher/professor at Harvard Medical School) has cured type 1 diabetes in mice and has been approved for Phase 1 clinical trials in humans. The only problem is raising the money, which Lee Iacocca is helping with."

Comments

Non-NYT article link

[vslashg]

The NYT must be cracking down; the first dozen logins from bugmenot.com didn't work for me.

No problem, I found a copy of the NYT article on Lee Iacocca's page. (Hopefully the server holds up.) Enjoy.

As a Type 1 Diabetic

[friedegg]

I've been following Dr Faustman's research since I learned of it a couple years ago, and I have a lot of hope that it will work. However, I've also been aware of the fact that if a cure is found, or a cheaper alternative treatment, there will be many obstacles to getting it to us.

Type 1 diabetics are in the minority, but we're still pretty big cash cows for certain companies. Besides the various types of insulin we need to survive, most diabetics that wish to succesfully manage the disease use additional products like disposeable needles, blood glucose meters and strips (big money), insulin pumps, and more. Potentially, it's many thousands of dollars per person per year and not many companies would want to lose that cashflow.