Diabetes Natural Cures:The Diabetes Controversy

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In March, Dr Roep's team published the results of a year-boy with type 1 diabetes who underwent stem cell transplantation. This, Dr Roep said, was the first definitive proof that type 1 diabetes can be cured. But there are still several critical questions to be answered. Dr Roep acknowledges that cure is "a dangerous word to use" in regard to type 1 diabetes research. But we think that we are onto a couple of leads. In some cases, the transplants can help a patient come off insulin, but other times the cells are rejected or attacked by the immune system unless immunosuppressant drugs are also given, which can cause side effects.

Dr Roep's team made a significant discovery along the way: Dr Roep says this is the first step towards personalising medicine in type 1 diabetes.

In other words we can now get a complete prediction of who will get the ultimate benefit - complete remission - and those who won't. The drugs we're using to prevent rejection of islets induce insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Dr Roep's team is also working on a separate approach: Last year the team administered a patient with a vaccine consisting of the patient's own immune cells, taken from his blood, that were treated with vitamin D3 and a beta-cell protein.

I think that manager would be more motivated to help his friend or family member than to add a few more dollars to his bonus. That's because, at the end of the day, no matter how similar type 1 and type 2 diabetes look on the outside, they are fundamentally different diseases on the inside. And if it's all about the products, why do pharma companies even bother supporting cure research at all?

The diabetes community is no stranger to non-profit organizations like JDRF teaming up with Pharma like Sanofi for such research. It sounds so wonderful and sincere, yet I can't help but doubt the motives just a bit. One indelible truth is that pharma is aggressively for-profit, and is always looking for the next big "blockbuster drug.

Could it come down to a "business decision" that some promising possible cure simply isn't worth pursuing because the exploration phase is so expensive and it may not pan out? Brewer is a little vague on the specifics, but he explains that JDRF is able to incentivize obviously, with money pharmaceutical companies to work on projects that they otherwise wouldn't bother with.

We can all agree that the development of drugs and devices are painstakingly slow, so you can only imagine how slow a cure will be! Finances have always been a guiding influence in what research is funded and approved. Scientists need to prove why they should continue getting a salary and research dollars from their institution. Many of those dollars are sourced from the government or from pharmaceutical companies.

It's an incredibly complicated web of stakeholders and investors. Ricordi says that critics label cure-research focused as "overambitious" or that they have a "high risk of failure" or "not enough preliminary evidence. But it looks like pharma's financial priorities aren't the only obstacle.

In addition to the extraordinarily complicated biological systems that researchers must understand and then manipulate, there's another complicated system we have to overcome: Historically, this shift occurred in the s, after the development of the Polio vaccine, when the FDA went from focusing on "safety" to focusing on "efficacy," Ricordi explained.

So the real "conspiracy" against a cure could very well be coming from the FDA , which doesn't have a financial stake in keeping diabetes around but does have a vested interest in being extremely risk-averse, i. But at what cost? Camillo Ricordi, on the FDA's role in cure research.

No one can afford to develop a cure any longer -- or better, very few multinational giants could afford it, if this was in their strategic interest," Ricordi adds. The American Diabetes Association shared that they are hoping to encourage diabetes research with their new cure-research focused "Pathway to Stop Diabetes" program.

Are there things impeding a cure for diabetes? There are financial and regulatory considerations, and then there's the whole issue of the complexity of the human body. But is there someone hiding the cure for diabetes? It just doesn't make sense. This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community.