SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – There are two forms of diabetes, Type 2, which typically develops due to lifestyle factors, and the rarer Type 1 diabetes.
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“This is the form where the immune system mistakenly attacks the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas,” explained Dr. Stephen Gitelman, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and director of the Pediatric Diabetes Program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, on the latest episode of “As Prescribed” with KCBS Radio’s Alice Wertz.
Gitelman said that this type of diabetes can be particularly difficult to manage. Recently, researchers made a step towards making Type 1 diabetes management easier – creation of the drug teplizumab. An injection that includes the drug was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last November.
A new study found that “children who were recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes need less supplemental insulin to keep their blood sugar in a healthy range if they use the immunotherapy drug teplizumab,” UCSF said this October.
“We’ve been hard at work trying to figure out how we can get the immune system to leave those... cells alone,” Gitelman said. Eventually, scientists determined that T cells destroy beta cells in the pancreas.
According to UCSF, teplizumab dampens down the destruction of the beta cells and helps to preserve the 10-40% most people still have at the time of diagnosis. These cells are typically destroyed within months, and maintaining beta cells makes it much easier to manage the disease.
“This newer drug that we’re talking about today is a specific therapy against T cells, and it targets a component of a unique receptor on T cells,” Gitelman told Wertz.
Going forward, this treatment and new screening processes are expected to make life for Type 1 diabetes patients better.
“The excitement with this drug is that we’ve learned how to screen to predict who might get type one diabetes using genetic measures, immunologic measures and metabolic assessments,” Gitleman said. “And we can find people very high risk, close to 100% risk for development of type one diabetes in the next five years. And the drug that we’re talking about today was tested in that highest risk group and shown to delay the onset of clinical diabetes by an average of three years.”
Listen to this week’s “As Prescribed” to learn more.
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