New Diabetes Center Renews Commitment to Finding a Cure

Bringing together an unparalleled array of scientists, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF) and the Harvard Medical School (HMS) recently initiated a vigorous joint effort to find a cure for Type I diabetes.

A five-million-dollar grant for the next five years from the Florence DeGeorge Islet Research Challenge has made possible the establishment of the new JDF Center for Islet Cell Transplantation at HMS.

The project will gather 32 researchers from varied fields to investigate a cure.

"The JDF/Harvard Center is a special undertaking because it involves an unusually broad spectrum of specialists, from transplant surgeons to immunologists to embryologists, all cooperating and challenging one another to find an effective path forward on this important problem," says Douglas A. Melton, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the College and a leading researcher at the Center. Melton's seven-year-old son suffers from Type I diabetes.

Killing one American every three minutes, diabetes in an illness that limits its victims' ability to process sugar and, in turn, affects their other bodily functions. Patients with Type I diabetes, ordinarily diagnosed as children, cannot digest glucose throughout their lives as their immune systems attack and destroy the insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas.

The new center's research takes a novel approach to treating the disease by seeking to transplant functional islet cells into patients without immunosuppressants. While these drugs prevent side effects such as rejection of the transplant, they can also seriously infringe upon the patients' everyday activities.

According to Center officials, the project's strategy is fourfold, focusing on islet transplantation, tolerance induction, autoimmunity and expansion of islet cell supply.

While the researchers have reason to be hopeful, challenges still lie ahead.

"As far as the research, it is important not to promise a cure when we don't know when or if it can be obtained," says Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, Center director, associate professor of research at HMS and transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"We hope to begin clinical trials of islet transplantation at Harvard before 2000 and to initiate trials of novel strategies to make it work within two years after that," he says. "But these will be trials--if we knew they would work, we wouldn't need a $20-million-dollar center and a commitment for at least five years to work on the problem at Harvard by the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation."

JDF is the principal non-profit, nongovernmental source of funding for diabetes research in the world.

"JDF was founded by the parents of children with diabetes who promised to find a cure in their children's lifetime," JDF Chairman of the Board John J. McDonough says in a press release. "We will keep that promise."