(Press-News.org) A research team from the University of British Columbia and the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) at BC Children's Hospital has identified the role of a type of T cell in type 1 diabetes that may lead to new treatment options for young patients.
Also known as juvenile diabetes, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease primarily affecting children and young adults. In patients with type 1 diabetes, the body attacks itself by destroying insulin-producing cells in the pancreas that regulate glucose, or blood sugar.
Led by Rusung Tan, a Pathology professor in the UBC Faculty of Medicine and co-head of the Immunity in Health and Disease research cluster at CFRI, the research team has identified the increased presence of Th17 cells, a type of T cell discovered in 2005, in children newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
"T cells are white blood cells and key members of the immune system that control infections," says Tan, who is also a member of the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at BC Children's Hospital and a senior scholar of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. "In healthy individuals, Th17 cells provide a strong defence against bacteria and viruses by guiding the immune system to strongly attack infected targets within our bodies."
However, Th17 has been associated with other autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease, which suggests they can play a harmful role. Treatments designed to block Th17 cells are in clinical trials for these diseases.
"The elevated levels of Th17 cells in type 1 diabetes patients suggest that these cells may also play a key role in the early development of this disease in young patients," says Tan. "This discovery opens the door to new treatments for childhood diabetes that target Th17 cells."
###
The findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Immunology. The team consists of researchers from UBC, CFRI and the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. At the time of the study, lead author Dr. Ashish Marwaha was a master's student at UBC and CFRI. The study was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine provides innovative education programs in health and life sciences, teaching over 3,000 students at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels. In addition, over 700 researchers/faculty members representing all of the Faculty's 19 departments, two schools and 15 research centres and institutes received research grants. In 2008/09 the Faculty generated more than one-half of the total research funding of the university ($475.3M). For more information visit www.med.ubc.ca.
The Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) works in close partnership with the University of British Columbia and the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics; BC Children's Hospital and Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children, BC Women's Hospital & Health Centre and BC Mental Health & Addiction Services, agencies of the Provincial Health Services Authority; and BC Children's Hospital Foundation. CFRI has additional important relationships with British Columbia's five regional health authorities and with B.C. academic institutions Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, the University of Northern British Columbia and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. For more information, visit www.cfri.ca.
BC Children's Hospital and Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children is British Columbia's only pediatric hospital and home to many specialized pediatric services available nowhere else in the province, including B.C.'s trauma centre for children, pediatric intensive care, kidney and bone marrow transplants, open heart surgery, neurosurgery and cancer treatment. Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children is the provincial facility that offers specialized child development and rehabilitation services to children and youth. BC Children's and Sunny Hill is an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority.
Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute is the research body of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which includes B.C.'s largest academic and teaching health sciences centres: Vancouver General Hospital, UBC Hospital, and GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre. The institute, academically affiliated with UBC Faculty of Medicine, is one of Canada's top funded research centres, with $102 million in total research funding for 2008/2009. VCH Research Institute brings innovation and discovery to patient care, advancing healthier lives in healthy communities across British Columbia, Canada, and beyond. www.vchri.ca.
END
###
For the complete business office feature with individual company rankings, go to
dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.opms.r1000097.
The article will be posted at this URL address the evening of 7 October 2010.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated ...
Spanish and Scottish researchers have added wool fibres to the clay material used to make bricks and combined these with an alginate, a natural polymer extracted from seaweed. The result is bricks that are stronger and more environmentally-friendly, according to the study published recently in the journal Construction and Building Materials.
"The objective was to produce bricks reinforced with wool and to obtain a composite that was more sustainable, non-toxic, using abundant local materials, and that would mechanically improve the bricks' strength", Carmen Galán and ...
Pioneering new research by archaeologists at the University of York suggests that Neanderthals belied their primitive reputation and had a deep seated sense of compassion.
A team from the University's Department of Archaeology took on the 'unique challenge' of charting the development of compassion in early humans.
The researchers examined archaeological evidence for the way emotions began to emerge in our ancestors six million years ago and then developed from earliest times to more recent humans such as Neanderthals and modern people like ourselves. The research by ...
Allergies occur when the defence mechanisms of the immune system malfunction and misread normal substances entering the body as invading pathogens. Antibodies are part of our biochemical arsenal for combating viruses, bacteria, parasites and other alien substances, but during an allergic reaction the antibody, known as IgE, is directed against usually harmless substances such as grass pollen, nuts, pets or eggs. Asthma and allergies are chronic diseases that reduce quality of life and pose an economic burden on society. New parents have therefore previously been asked if ...
Light drinking during pregnancy does not harm a young child's behavioural or intellectual development, reveals research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
A previous study of 3 year olds drew similar conclusions, but the authors wanted to rule out possible delayed "sleeper" effects in older children.
They used data from the Millennium Cohort Study - a large study tracking the long term health of children born in the UK - drawing on a representative sample of 11,513 children born between September 2000 and January 2002.
Participants' ...
The provision of made-to-order drugs ("specials") in primary care is expensive, often unnecessary, and associated with legal pitfalls, says the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB).
It calls for a major overhaul of the practice, in a review of the evidence in this month's issue.
Bespoke drugs or "specials" are medicines made specifically to meet the needs of individual patients, so may be prepared in formulations and strengths which differ from those of standard licensed medicines.
They might be prescribed, for example, when a patient can't or won't swallow tablets ...
A persistently noisy workplace more than doubles an employee's risk of serious heart disease, suggests research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Young male smokers seemed to be particularly at risk, the findings showed.
The researchers base their findings on a nationally representative sample of more than 6,000 employees, aged from 20 upwards, who had been part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2004.
This involved detailed household interviews, to include lifestyle and occupational health, ...
Therapeutic antibodies can be an efficient alternative when common drugs do not work anymore. However, antibodies obtained from blood of animals such as mice could not be used: The human immune system recognizes them as foreign and rejects them. In an international cooperation, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have now succeeded in developing a promising approach to solve this problem; with the help of human stem cells they generated mice with a human immune system, which were then vaccinated to produce human monoclonal ...
AUGUSTA, Ga. – The most toxic free radical appears responsible for much of the lung damage that can result from oxygen therapy in the critically ill or injured, Medical College of Georgia researchers report.
Within just a few days, ventilators and oxygen chambers used to significantly increase oxygen levels can also dramatically increase levels of peroxynitrite, an oxidant powerful enough to break down DNA and cause proteins to malfunction, said Dr. Yunchao Su, pharmacologist in the MCG Schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies.
Oxygen toxicity is the most severe side ...
Montreal, October 05, 2010 – Working nine-to-five may be the way to make a living, but it may be padding more than the wallet. According to a new study from the Université de Montréal, office-workers have become less active over the last three decades and this decreased activity may partly explain the rise in obesity. Their findings, published in the early online edition of Preventive Medicine, may have health implications for the millions of people toiling behind their desks.
"People eat better and exercise more today than they did in the 1970's, yet obesity rates ...
