New Vaccine May Help Type 1 Diabetics in Future

The new vaccine treatment under study focuses on the immune response, rather than trying to blunt the entire immune system. It's made of a protein called GAD that's normally found in the brain and in the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas. In people with diabetes, it's as if they're allergic to GAD, Ludvigsson explained.

The hope is that the vaccine he and his team developed -- which was administered the first day of the study and then again at day 30 -- will work in a similar manner to allergy immunotherapy and help the body learn to tolerate GAD again.

The study included 70 children between the ages of 10 and 18 who had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes no more than 18 months before the start of the study. The children were randomly split into two groups -- one received treatment, the other a placebo.

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At the end of the study, insulin requirements didn't change. But, in children who were more recently diagnosed, there was evidence that the treated group retained more activity in their pancreas, Ludvigsson said.

That's important because the more insulin-producing function you retain, "the short-term risks are less, as are the risk of long-term complications," said Dr. Richard Insel, executive vice president of research for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

"What you're seeing is, the field is trying to move away from broad-based immunosuppression to targeting one specific immune response, and this is an early attempt to develop a much more focused approach to modulate immune function in new-onset diabetes," Insel said.

The good news is that the vaccine seemed safe and didn't cause any troubling side effects, according to Faustman. "GAD looks pretty benign here -- two vaccinations given four weeks apart. There's something positive happening, though the therapeutic benefit is small. But, there was a measurable and significant benefit."

Ludvigsson said the researchers have begun new trials, including children who've had diabetes for a much shorter time because those were the ones who responded most in this study. Additionally, they'll be working on a clinical trial to see if this vaccination could be used to prevent type 1 diabetes from occurring in children who have a high risk of the disease.

More information

Learn more about type 1 diabetes from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.