Tag: Diabetes

Research Defence Society Goes On the Offensive Against Animal Rights Misinformation

Earlier this month Great Britain’s Research Defence Society launch a campaign to publicize the benefits of medical research with animals and dispel some of the misinformation about that research commonly spread by animal rights activists.

The campaign features 16-year-old Laura Cowell. Cowell suffers from Cystic Fibrosis and Diabetes. Like many cystic fibrosis sufferers, she has to take dozens of pills a day simply to stay alive. Even with enormous advancements made in treating her disease over the past couple decades, Cowell will be lucky to live to 50 without further medical advances. Advances, of course, which animal rights activists are doing everything in their power to prevent.

Cowell told The Guardian (London),

All my life I have been aware of how important this research is. Ever since I can remember I have been taking medicine. So far I have managed to live a fairly normal life. My mum says I should fit cystic fibrosis around my life rather than the other way around. I love animals and I have pets of my own but I owe my life to medical research. Without it I would be dead.

|Mark Matfield|, the director of the Research Defence Society, told The Guardian that it was time more people in the research industry spoke out against the animal rights movement. “There is a real fear about being targeted by the animal rights movement,” Matfield told the newspaper. “There may be risk involved in speaking out, but people like myself, with a high profile . . . should lead by example.”

Matfield has received death threat from animal rights activists and had his car vandalized for speaking out in favor of animal research.

Nancy Rothwell, a researcher at Manchester University, echoes this Matfield’s sentiment, telling The Guardian, “It is important that we are challenged about the research we carry out, but unfortunately the minority who take extreme action, like sending death threats, stifle that debate. We have been too apologetic in this country to make the case, but we have also been frightened because of the threat of physical violence.”

The Research Defence Society has produced a slick, thorough pamphlet about the role of animal research, Understanding Animal Research in Medicine which is available for download as a PDF file from its web site.

Source:

Researchers hit back at animal rights activists. Paul Kelso, The Guardian (London), January 16, 2002.

Researchers hit back at animal rights activists. Paul Kelso, The Guardian (London), January 16, 2002. (Note this article is cited twice since The Guardian published two different version of it in two different editions of its paper).

Living proof defends animal research. Mark Henderson, The Times (London), January 16, 2002.

Animal Research Leads to Stunning Advance in Nanotech Medicine

It’s long been a staple of science fiction — cure a disease such as diabetes by injecting extremely tiny nanotech machines into the body that will automatically regulate insulin level. Now, however, thanks to medical research with animals, this scenario is now science fact and likely to head to tests in human beings within a few years.

Bioengineering researcher Tejal Desai has managed to create a nanotech device that essentially cures rats afflicted with diabetes. Desai’s method involves injecting the diabetic mice with extremely small machines that contain insulin-producing cells.

The major obstacle to such an approach is that the bodies of both animals and human beings will launch an immune system attack against the insulin-producing cells. Desai gets around this by including tiny pores in the nanomachine that are only 7 nanometers across — wide enough to allow insulin to leave the nanomachine, but too small for antibodies to invade and attack.

Once in the bloodstream, the nanomachines should last a lifetime, meaning an insulin nanomachine would essentially be a cure for diabetes.

Desai’s next step will be long-term studies of her insulin nanomachines in small animals, followed by tests on larger animals such as chimpanzees.

Source:

Tiny capsules float downstream. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, October 29, 2001.

Researchers Cure Type I Diabetes In Mice

Researchers at Yonsei University in Korea and the University of Calgary in Canada recently announced they had developed a gene therapy cure for mice suffering from type I insulin. In type I insulin, which afflicts millions of people, the body doesn’t produce enough insulin because the insulin-producing beta cells within the pancreas are destroyed.

The genetic therapy cure involved injecting mice with a virus that contained a gene designed to spur insulin production. After receiving the treatment, the animals’ blood sugar levels remained stable for the eight month period of the study.

Because of differences in mouse and human physiology, there are still enormous obstacles that would have to be overcome before such gene therapy could be a viable treatment option in human beings. It is an important first step in that direction. It wasn’t too long ago that proof that genetically modified cells could be made to produce insulin was heralded as an important step forward. Now by demonstrating that complex organisms such as mice can be successfully treated in this way provides enormous hope that this century will likely be the last in which type I diabetes is a significant health problem.

Jerrold Olefsky of the University of California-San Diego, in a commentary on the research published in Nature, wrote that, “Despite these issues, the paper represents a good example of how basic research can applied to problems of clinical significance.”

And also a prime example of why basic research on animal models must continue.

Source:

Gene therapy used to cure rodents with diabetes. Reuters, November 23, 2000.

Stem cell therapy reverses diabetes in mice

For years now, one of the tantalizing
possibilites for stem cell researchers has been using the technique to
provide a treatment for diabetes. That promise took a large step forward
in February when researchers announced they had managed to reverse diabetes
in mice using stem cells.

Stem cells are “master” cells
that direct the creation of other cells in the body. In this case researchers
isolated stem cells from the pancreases of mice, and transferred them
into diabetic mice.

The mice suffered from a condition
similar to Type-I diabetes (also called juvenile diabetes) in humans.
In this form of diabetes, which afflicts about 1.6 million Americans,
the body develops an immune response to islet cells that produce insulin
and attack the cells, interfering with the body’s ability to control levels
of blood sugar. Currently Type-I diabetes is usually treated with insulin
injections (another technology developed thanks to extensive animal experimentation).

When the pancreas stem cells
were injected in the mice, they spurred the creation of islets which produce
insulin in the mice, reversing their diabetic condition.

The next step will be seeing
if the phenomenon can be repeated in human beings, and the researchers
are confident that this will be replicable. “In preliminary experiments
it appears that we can take human pancreatic duct cells and show that
they can differentiate into islet cells as well,” said Dr. Desmond Schatz,
a diabetes expert who worked on the stem cell research at the University
of Florida in Gainesville.

Reference:

U.S. team reversed mouse diabetes with stem cells. Reuters, February
28, 2000.

Genetically engineered insulin distribution in mice

Whether or not it ever leads
to any specific application in human beings, the recent announcement in
Science of a new technique for delivering insulin highlights the sort
of medical technologies that widespread genetic engineering is going to
unleash.

       Researchers at Ariad Pharmaceuticals
in Cambridge, Massachusetts genetically engineered cells to produce insulin
along side a protein that causes the insulin to clump up together within
the cell. The insulin is thus trapped in the cell as it is too large to
pass through the cell wall.

       The cells were then injected
into the muscles of diabetic mice and then fed a drug that causes the
clumping protein to split apart which releases the insulin and thereby
lowered the glucose level of the mice. Tim Clackson, the senior author
of the study published in Science, told the Associated Press, “The insulin
stays in the compartments of the cell and has no toxicity or adverse effects.
It just sits there. Only when the animal receives the drug do the aggregates
break apart and then flow into the circulation.”

       The result — a potentially
needle free treatment for diabetes, and possibly a whole host of other
illnesses. Dr. Harvey Berger,Ariad Pharmaceuticals’ CEO, suggested the
technology could have broader application such as managing chronic pain,
with the cells engineered to produce and release endorphins on cue rather
than insulin. Another possibility would be for using the technique to
treat conditions which required regular, periodic release of some protein,
such as growth hormone.

       Ariad Pharmaceuticals hopes
to begin human trials of this fascinating technology by 2003.

References:

Researchers
find new way to deliver insulin in lab studies. Associated Press,
February 4, 2000.

Gene therapy
may replace insulin shots in diabetics. Reuters, February 4, 2000.

Will Mary Tyler Moore Please Make Up Her Mind?

On June 22, Mary Tyler Moore appeared with about 100 young people on Capitol
Hill to lobby for increased funding for juvenile diabetes. Moore, chairwoman
of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, told the Senate Appropriations Committee,

What gives us all hope at JDF is the promise of research and the commitment
of this Committee and you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Harkin, to make doubling
the NIH budget over the next five years a top national priority … Look
around this room once more, listen to the voices of the children who will
tell you their stories today, and when you retire to your deliberations, promise
to remember them—promise to remember the more than 16 million people
who, like me, have diabetes.

Is this the same Mary Tyler Moore who is a People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals favorite for her many pro-animal rights stances? Along with some
anti-fur activism, PETA has championed Moore for endorsing its anti-Premarin
campaign. PETA and Moore object to Premarin, a hormone replacement therapy for
post-menopausal women, because it is derived from the urine of horses that PETA
claims are mistreated.

The money she is asking to go to studying juvenile diabetes would, of course,
include extensive funds channeled to animal research. The Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation is solidly behind a recent report made by the Congressionally mandated
Diabetes Working Group. That report offers numerous recommendations on how to
proceed with research on diabetes, a significant portion of which will involve
extensive use of animals. For example, the DWG notes that there are still enormous
unknowns about diabetes’ effects on cardiovascular disease:

Little is known, for example, about how diabetes causes arteriosclerosis
and cardiovascular disease. However, advances in the exciting area of genetic
research may soon make it possible to develop animal models with both diabetes
and arteriolosclerosis, or other cardiovascular abnormalities. Such animal
models, which closely mimic human diabetes, could help answer many questions
about the disease.

In fact just about every recommendation the DWG makes, from increased research
on obesity to more funding for basic research on cell signaling would rely heavily
(as does most such research) on experiments with animals. The Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation itself recognized the importance of this when it recently collaborated
with the Harvard Medical School to launch the JDF Center for Islet Cell Transplantation
at Harvard Medical School. Islet transplantation involves replacing the body’s
insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in Type I diabetes when the body
express an immune reaction to the cells. Such research, which so far has produced
some tantalizing insights but no medically viable treatment in humans, has involved
extensive tests on animals.

All of which makes Moore the typical animal rights Hollywood hypocrite who
latches on to the movement as a nice, safe, and oh-so politically correct cause
and never even bothers to think about the contradictions of being in league
with PETA which actively opposes everything she’s trying to accomplish
with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

Prior to giving her testimony, Moore told CNN, “I think it’s going
to be very difficult for the people in Congress to listen to these children
tell them what it’s like to live with a chronic disease like diabetes
and not remember it.” Maybe people in Congress might find it difficult,
but Moore’s friends at PETA won’t. They list the Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation as one of several dozen health-oriented charities that “starve,
cripple, burn, poison, and slice open animals to study human diseases and disabilities.
Such experiments have no practical benefit to anyone.”