Marking a milestone

2021 marks 100 years since insulin was first discovered. While a lot has improved in the management of diabetes since then, researchers have even bigger hopes for the future.

Celebrating 100 years of insulin

Despite being 100 years old, the discovery of insulin is still regarded as one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical history. Proof? It’s no coincidence that the date of World Diabetes Day, which occurs on November 14 every year, is the birthday of Frederic Banting, one of the researchers who made the discovery working in a lab at Canada’s University of Toronto in 1921.

In short, identifying insulin and the role it plays in diabetes was a game changer. Just a few months later in January 1922, the first injection of insulin was given to a person, a 14-year old boy called Leonard Thompson who’d been diagnosed with diabetes two years earlier. A pharmaceutical company began producing insulin commercially the following year and the rest is history.

One hundred years on and today, 432,000 insulin injections are given every single day in Australia to regulate blood glucose levels, with insulin remaining the mainstay of treatment for people living with type 1 diabetes, which includes around 120,000 Australians.

To commemorate insulin’s 100-year anniversary, diabetes awareness, advocacy and research organisations all around the world are taking the opportunity to push for ‘more’. For example, JDRF, a foundation that funds type 1 diabetes research here in Australia, launched its #MoveTheNeedle campaign, acknowledging why 100 years is such a significant milestone while at the same time highlighting the fact that there’s still a lot of work to do.

Promisingly though, the work is already very much in progress. At the moment, JDRF alone is funding more than 50 type 1 diabetes research projects around the nation, projects that focus on either curing type 1 or improving the lives of people living with it.

A population screening program for type 1 is in the pipeline for Australia.

A pilot study to screen Australian children from the general population and without a family history of type 1 diabetes, is underway. Funded by JDRF and being run by the University of Sydney, the screening tool the study is using looks for chemical markers in the blood, called islet autoantibodies, that indicate a person is likely to develop type 1 even when they’re free of symptoms. Being able to diagnose type 1 diabetes at a much earlier stage would significantly reduce the risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious complication that can lead to diabetic coma. If the study is successful, researchers hope to expand to a national screening program.

A world-first clinical trial to stop the immune system from destroying insulinproducing cells has been launched.

Called the BANDIT Trial, it’s being performed by researchers at St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research (SVI) in Melbourne. “When type 1 diabetes is first diagnosed, there is a substantial number of insulin-producing cells still present,” says SVI’s Professor Helen Thomas.

The aim of the trial is to determine whether a drug called baricitinib, which is currently used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, will protect the insulin-producing cells from immune attack. “This would allow people who have recently been diagnosed with the disease to continue to produce insulin for a longer period to improve their glucose control.” Launched at the end of last year, the two-year trial is open to Australians aged between 12-30 who have been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the last 100 days, with enrolment expected to close in 2022.

For more info visit svi.edu.au/bandit.

The link between gut bacteria and diabetes is being uncovered.

Last year the results of a worldwide study revealed that islet autoantibodies – those chemical markers in the blood that indicate diabetes risk – develop at a young age and that children who develop them have a different combination of gut bacteria than children who don’t. Plus, early results from a University of Queensland study designed to investigate a diet-based therapy for type 1 diabetes not only suggest that a fibre-based diet can modify the gut bacteria of people living with type 1, it may even benefit blood glucose management, too.

There may be two subtypes of type 1 diabetes.

That’s according to researchers in the UK who have discovered that people who are diagnosed when they’re under seven years old seem to have a different form of the disease than people aged 13 and over. It’s a significant discovery in terms of the development of new type 1 treatments, because it means some may be more effective than others, depending on your age.

A protein that may play a role in diabetes complications has been identified.

Research out of Monash University suggests that when a protein known by the acronym RAGE is missing from cells in the body, it offers some protection against the development of common complications of type 1 diabetes, like kidney, eye and heart disease. The University’s research team have uncovered new ways to target RAGE, which means it could play an important role in the prevention of diabetesrelated complications in future. ■

HERE ARE A HANDFUL OF THE MOST EXCITING AND PROMISING RESEARCH BREAKTHROUGHS THAT HAVE MADE HEADLINES RECENTLY.