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'IMAX Movie of Body' Allows Stanford Geneticist To Stop Diabetes In Its Tracks
sciencehabit writes "Michael Snyder has taken 'know thyself' to the next level. Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body's immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In yesterday's issue of Cell (abstract), Snyder and a team of 40 other researchers present the results of this extraordinarily detailed look at his body, which they call an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) because it combines cutting-edge scientific fields such as genomics (study of one's DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins). Instead of seeing a snapshot of the body taken during the typical visit to a doctor's office, iPOP effectively offers an IMAX movie, which in Snyder's case had the added drama of charting his response to two viral infections and the emergence of type 2 diabetes."
Type 1 is an autoimmune disease (or at least that's the most widely held belief) where the body's immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas. As a result, the body stops production of insulin and without the administration of external insulin (primarily via injection), you die (quickly).
To reverse the disease, two things are required. One, the body must be trained to not attack the the insulin producing cells. They've experimented with this for quite a while with anti-rejection drugs and similar things, and have had some moderate success. Once this is done, though, it's necessary to get the body to begin producing insulin again. There's some research that indicates the body may be capable of doing this spontaneously once step one is complete (at least in mice). Otherwise, an external source (transplant from a donor or cloning or stem cells or...) of these insulin producing cells will have to be added to the body.