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Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes In Two Years?
resistant writes "Researchers at a Toronto hospital have stumbled upon a dramatic treatment for mouse diabetes, with large implications for the treatment of diabetes in humans. From the article: 'The islet inflammation cleared up and the diabetes was gone. Some have remained in that state for as long as four months, with just one injection... They also discovered that their treatments curbed the insulin resistance that is the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and that insulin resistance is a major factor in Type 1 diabetes, suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar.'"
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
I'm just amazed rodents share as many of our ailments as they do.
I know I know. They want hype and venture capital or fame or some such, but I can't count the number of things that are just a few years away and then never materialized.
I'd be much more interested in hearing about good inventions in retrospect.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
TFA Title: Diabetes breakthrough
Slashdot Title: Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes in Two Years?
Why not fork?
Because insulin was discovered via experiments on dogs, and for the first ~60 years of treatment, insulin was produced from pig and cow pancreases.
I am sorry for the pesimistic title. But as a Diabetic for the last 21 years, I have seen it all. If you follow this stuff, there seems to be one landmark approach after the other.
And what happens?
Very little. The approach rarely pans out or is sustainable, like the islet transplant techniques of a few years ago.
Diabetics, go for a run. Eat sensibly, and care for your body. Anything long term, is years, perhaps decades away.
--Alan
Yes, because using Google is so damn hard. Enter "Cell Journal" into Google. First link. The Article is available.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
That's possibly the most absurd thing I've ever read. If animal studies reveal nothing, why do they get performed? It's not like some evil corporate entity is forcing animal studies on scientists who secretly wish they could just stick these compounds in humans without bothering to test them out on animals first. No ethical scientist would ever want to do that and risk killing or injuring somebody without animal safety data, or getting somebody's hopes up without any efficacy testing in an animal model first.
Specific animals are usually chosen for studies because certain biological systems function in a very similar way to the relevant human biological system. Heck, plenty of drugs that work on humans work on cats and dogs and probably lots of mammals. Certain NSAIDs, antibiotics, steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs like valium), and some chemotherapy agents developed for use in humans, just to name a few drugs commonly used with cats and dogs off the top of my head.
Your suggestion then that the results of animal trials bear "no relation" to how they will perform in humans is simply nonsensical. Many drugs may seem to be active in animals, but in humans turn out to be no better than other drugs on the market in terms of efficacy and worse in terms of side effects, which commonly leads to dropping them from commercialization. Differential comparisons of drug efficacy in animal models aren't necessarily useful to determining which drugs will be the most effective in humans, and side effects are not always equivalent, but that's not the point of animal trials - the point is to establish that the basic biological mechanism works in vivo and to get a vague concept of possible safe dosing in an animal model before moving to initial human safety tests.
I fail to see how you and the other animal rights loonies can have such a poor grasp of how scientific research works and yet feel qualified to comment so authoritatively on it.
I am not a libertarian, but I am suspicious of demands that "those other people should be more self-sacrificing". Everybody complains about greedy drug companies, but except in rare cases, the folks complaining aren't taking 2nd jobs so they can donate the extra income to support medical research. It seems that it's somebody else's responsibility to make sacrifices.
Who exactly should be making the sacrifice? Should the unions that hold stock in the drug companies cut their pensions? Should the scientists and doctors doing the research take pay cuts? How about the folks who wash the glassware and tend the mice? Maybe the graphic designers who create the advertising? We could spread the sacrifice across the board by raising taxes, but most of the US seems convinced that they are already overtaxed.
These are brave researchers to challenge the orthodox view of purely auto-immune diabetes. It reminds me of what resistance there was to redefining ulcers as a curable inflection, versus a psychological or personality flaw that was incurable or required surgery removing most of the stomach. In the end Drs. Warren and Marshall won a Nobel prize, but not before enduring years of abuse and almost having their careers destroyed. I hope medicine is more open to radical new ideas today.
Then there was Thalidomide. It cause no increase in birth defect rates in any of the typical animal test species, such as mice, rabbits or pigs, which is why it was approved for human use. It wasn't until after the first human casualties were already being reported in Europe that a U.S. researcher got evidence of animal birth defects, and that took testing on exotics such as horses. The FDA employee who blocked sale in the US could only justify it as 'playing a hunch' and was almost fired before it turned out her hunch was right. How many animal test programs normally use expensive and slow reproducing creatures such as horses?
Who is John Cabal?
There's one helluva lot of difference between daily injections and one every four months. But, hey, why let facts and numbers get in the way of a humorous comment?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.