Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have identified a defect in the T cell regulatory pathway which normally controls autoreactive T cells that attack the body's own tissues and organs. A majority of people with Type 1 diabetes who were tested in the study were found to have the newly-identified cellular/molecular defect, and the researchers were able to successfully correct the defect in-vitro.
The study will be published on September 27, 2010 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
"For decades, autoimmune diseases have been treated by reducing overall immune response. That's been effective in extending life spans, but has been hard on the quality of life for many of those patients," said Hong Jiang, M.D. Ph.D., a faculty member of the Division of Rheumatology, in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and the leading scientist of the study and corresponding author of the paper. "Now that we understand the specific mechanism of how regulatory T cells discriminate between 'self' and 'non-self,' and the cellular/molecular defect that makes that process go awry, we hope to develop new type of therapies that specifically target the defect in patients without damaging their normal immune functions."
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