Snow Science Fact Checker

Monday, October 24, 2016

UN-SULIN

By: McKenna Hammer

Everybody knows someone who suffers from type 1 diabetes/ Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that affects your body's insulin production in the pancreas. It’s a lifelong disease that can affect what you eat, your physical activity and ultimately. the way you live. There is hundreds of medicine on the market, promising to help your symptoms of diabetes, but there is no known cure… Until now. Recently the company Demic stated in a facebook video that “The Vaccine against diabetes has officially been announced.” This video claimed that it could “reverse the effects of diabetes”. It claims to do this through a vaccine for Tuberculosis that was used a hundred years ago.This research is being conducted by Denise Faustman, an MD, a PHD, and the director of Massachusetts General Hospital Immunobiology lab. Her research using this old vaccine is proving that it might be a possible cure to type 1 diabetes. The purpose of this blog is taking the claim that this could possibly be a cure, and trying to prove it.

The ‘cure’ that is being tested is actually a proven vaccine to Tuberculous and a treatment for bladder cancer. The vaccine is called Bacillus Calmette-Guerin or BCG. BCG battles the defective immune cells called T lymphocytes or T cells in your pancreas. You have good T cells, and bad T cells. The BCG can target the defective T cells that attack insulin secreting islets (EndocrineWeb). Another way of fighting these defective T cells is an immune protein called tumor necrosis factor or TNF. Faustman and her team believe that TNF might have something to do with the attack on beta cells, which produce insulin, in the pancreas. The hormone helps produce good T cells and reduce the production of defective T cells (Diabetes forecast). The vaccine BCG not only targets defective T cells but allows the TNF levels in the pancreas to rise, allowing for insulin secreting cells to grow. (Time). So even if a patient has had type 1 diabetes for years, this medicine can actually help reverse their life altering disease.

The trial of this new cure has succeed in reversing type 1 diabetes in mice and other animals. The medicine has already moved to Phase 2, a five year program that tests people ages 18-65. The new trial’s goal is to identify the dose and schedule that would best push diabetes into remission. The trials have found that low multi dose injections of BCG is safe and is showing signs of reversing the disease. The trial has also found complications such as with too high dose of BCG, the body can develop antibodies to fight the vaccine (Faustman Lab), and if entered directly in the blood stream it can cause hypoglycemia. Despite these little side effects, the trials are showing promise. Recently in the second trial, people who have had diabetes for 10+ have started to secrete their own insulin again.

The fact that the BCG vaccine was used hundreds of years ago as a Tuberculosis vaccine, means that it is still used in underdeveloped countries, which leading to the decline in type 1 diabetes. In 1st world countries, it isn’t used as much. But this medicine isn’t only being introduced as a cure for type 1 diabetes, but as a vaccine for diabetes.It reduces the symptoms of type 1 diabetes in children.

In conclusion, Faustman and her team are working on a revolutionary cure for a disease that we didn’t think was curable. The statement made by Demic is accurate, if the trial two testing goes well, we will have a vaccine for type 1 diabetes. By treating type 1 diabetes with the BCG vaccination, you can reverse and put the disease in remission. The BCG targets the bad T cells, and allows the TNF levels to rise, which allows people to start producing insulin on their own. This research could affect and change millions of lives.