Key points from article :
Nearer first-in-human clinical trial of type 1 diabetes (T1D) experimental therapy.
Goal: Find new treatment turning off destructive immune response leading to T1D in children.
Team focuses on T cells, the immune system's disease-fighting white blood cells.
Effector T cells mistakenly attack insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas.
This continues because regulatory T cells (Treg) do not function normally.
"A healthy immune system requires regulatory T cells to balance attack of effector T cells."
To stop attack, they engineered patients own T cells (edTreg) to function like normal Treg.
Turned on FOXP3 to equip T cells with instructions needed to specialize into Treg.
They also made it antigen-specific, critical feature to targeting pancreatic cells in T1D.
With new funding received and further fine-tuning, phase 1 clinical trial comes near.
Researchers from Seattle Children's and Benaroya Research Institute.
Published in Science Translational Medicine.
