Pitt researcher prevents diabetes in mice

Imagine waking up every morning and having to give yourself a blood test and an injection so… Imagine waking up every morning and having to give yourself a blood test and an injection so that you can make it through the day. Then imagine having to give yourself another three or four shots periodically until you go to sleep.

This lifestyle of constant medical vigilance is not just a figment of the imagination, but a reality for the thousands of Americans coping with the daily demands of diabetes.

Although not all diabetics have to control their disease with daily injections, 20 million adults and children in the United States have some form of diabetes. And nearly one-third of those people don’t even know that they suffer from this life-threatening illness.

But researchers at Pitt are currently working to change the numbers.

William M. Ridgway, an assistant professor in Pitt’s School of Medicine, along with a team of graduate and post-graduate researchers, recently published his findings on how to prevent type 1 diabetes in mice in the journal Diabetes.

His paper, “Modulating Protective and Pathogenic CD4+ Subsets via CD137 in Type 1 Diabetes,” chronicles his results from more than three years of working with mice that were genetically susceptible to diabetes.

After injecting the young, healthy mice with an antibody, or disease fighting agent, called CD137, the mice, which were almost 80 percent likely to develop the disorder, did not contract the disease.

“It boosted the number of protective cells in the body,” Ridgway said of CD137. “It didn’t stop bad cells directly, but boosted the good cells to protect.”

Ridgway hopes that this protection from diabetes will work on humans, too. Although he doesn’t yet know if CD137 will be safe for humans or if it will even have any effect at all, he plans on continuing his research.

“The only way to know is to actually do the experiment,” Ridgway said with excitement after delivering a lecture about his work and its potential to an audience of about 40 people at the Rangos Research Center on Wednesday.

With help from the National Institutes of Health grant through Pitt’s Autoimmunity Center of Excellence, Ridgway hopes to continue working with CD137, expanding his research to utilize the resources of Children’s Hospital.

“If it’s found in humans, it could be quite big, it could be a significant finding,” he added, suggesting that the research on mice may be expanded to include humans and potentially could conquer type 1 diabetes.

But that will take years of more testing, clinical trials and close attention to diabetes patients.

Usually diagnosed in children and young adults, type 1 diabetes, an incurable and thought-to-be genetic autoimmune disorder, makes up only 5 to 10 percent of cases of the disease.

Most diabetics suffer from the type 2 version, brought on by a combination of having a family history and leading a sedentary lifestyle.

Both types 1 and 2 can lead to dramatic health complications, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blindness, kidney disease, heart attack and stroke, but because type 1 manifests earlier in life, its effects are more serious.

While Ridgway does not deal with type 2 diabetes, his recent work gives hope for future treatment in humans who suffer everyday from the detriment of the more virulent type 1.

No cure or prevention method currently exists for diabetes.

Janice Zgibor, assistant professor of epidemiology and director of evaluation at the Pitt Diabetes Institute, recommends that adult diabetics, college students in particular, seek out information regarding their condition and their lifestyle management in order to properly treat their disease.

But a surprisingly small number of diabetics, only 34 percent in Allegheny County, have attended courses on managing diabetes, according to statistics from 2005 on the Pennsylvania Department of Health Web site.

However, more than 50 percent of diabetics in and around Pittsburgh do manage their condition by taking pills, injecting insulin and checking their blood sugar levels daily.

While type 2 diabetics often do not need any further treatment besides maintaining proper diet and exercise, type 1 diabetics must rely on insulin injections to control their disease, according to Zgibor.

And with the help of Ridgway’s research, type 1 diabetics of the future may not even need to worry about that.

“This is a slam dunk,” he said.