Taking aim at diabetes culprit cells
Drs. David Serreze and Yi-Guang Chen of The Jackson Laboratory collaborated with colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York, N.Y. and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., to discover a possible new way to head off type 1 diabetes. In a paper published on April 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers show that it's possible to destroy a certain kind of cell implicated in diabetes progression.
Immune cells usually keep us healthy by finding and destroying invading viruses and bacteria. In type 1 diabetes, some immune cells get misguided and attack the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin instead of invading microbes. Dr. Serreze identified a specific kind of these rogue cells, called AI4, and developed a mouse model system to study how the process worked. Now able to target and destroy AI4 cells, the researchers' next step is to see if they can prevent diabetes in the mouse model.
