Tackling type 1 diabetes

Around 400,000 people in the UK have type 1 diabetes, 30,000 are children. Professor Lucy Walker explains how she and her team are working to prevent this increasingly prevalent disease.

What is type 1 diabetes?

Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong condition caused by the body's immune system attacking the pancreas, which affects insulin production. We need insulin to regulate the blood sugar level in our bodies.

Typically, onset of diabetes is between the ages of 9-14 years, but more children under 5 are now being diagnosed.

Our goal

Due to our research, we now know more important information about the immune cells that cause type 1 diabetes. My team has two strands:

• Developing therapies that interfere with this type of immune response
• Monitoring the effectiveness of these therapies.

Professor Lucy Walker

How we work

Currently when therapies are tried in people with type 1 diabetes, results become clear only after about a year. However, by looking at biological markers in the immune cells discovered in this research, we can tell far sooner which therapies look promising.

Drug trials are usually very long-term and expensive, but by finding a way tomonitor the blood’s response, new medicines could be developed faster.

Our progress so far

My team has worked closely with the clinical diabetes team and with patients to study immune cells in the blood. We have discovered immune markers in the blood that appear even before a person develops type 1 diabetes.

This may help us and other researchers predict who will develop type 1 diabetes before any symptoms occur, and could lead to medicines being given early on in a person’s life before any pancreas cells have been destroyed.

At the moment, once you’ve got type 1 diabetes, you’ve got it for life. But one day I hope they will find a cure so people don’t have to go through what I have.

Jess Harris, Patient