Type 1 diabetes usually starts during childhood or adolescence unlike Type 2 diabetes which is an adult-onset disease often linked to obesity.
Those children and adolescents afflicted with Type 1 diabetes suddenly have a much brighter future thanks to some terminally ill mice who were returned to health after injection of BCG vaccine.
Human trials to begin at MGH on 'diabetes cure'
The first step in the human study is to determine whether the same strategy using BCG vaccination can be used to modify the abnormal autoimmune cells present in type 1 diabetes, sometimes called “juvenile-onset” diabetes.
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“One of the beauties of this is that BCG is a drug that has been tried and tested for 80 years, “ said Dr Faustman.
“There is no multi- million-dollar drug approval pipeline. It is a generic drug and will be cheap to administer if it works for humans.”