UF study identifies immune cells that may help sustain Type 1 diabetes attack
Type 1 diabetes isn’t an overnight attack against the body’s ability to make insulin. It can be a sustained campaign over years that relentlessly targets insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.
Scientists have not fully understood why this autoimmune attack — when the body’s immune system mistakenly destroys its own healthy cells — persists so long rather than petering out.
“People can generate autoimmunity occasionally, but it tends to be corralled by the body’s protective mechanisms,” said Todd Brusko, Ph.D., director of the University of Florida Diabetes Institute.
Brusko and a team of UF Health collaborators describe in a new study how a group of immune stem-like cells appears to perpetuate Type 1 diabetes by potentially renewing themselves and replenishing the supply of immune T cells that carry out the autoimmune attack.
The study, relying on analysis of individual immune cells observed in unprecedented detail, was published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Leeana Peters, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Brusko’s lab, is the paper’s lead author.