Posted April 14, 2011
Carter Daly tromps in from shooting hoops in the driveway to get a snack with his brother, prompting his mother to call after him in the kitchen.
“Figure it out and bolus for it, please,” Gretchen Daly says. “Figure out your carbs, guys.”
Before every meal and snack, 8-year-old Carter gives himself a bolus, or big load of insulin, to help his body cope with type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there was no family history and no warning it was coming until it showed up in infancy.
Researchers at Georgia Health Sciences University have identified a protein they say could be a biomarker for those at high risk to develop and might also serve as a therapy.
There is a drug that targets it approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat similar diseases.
Dr. Jin-Xiong She and her colleagues at the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine have been following thousands of families around the world with children at high risk of developing type 1 diabetes and looking for genetic changes that could tell them which child is more likely to go on to get the disease.
She has followed children in studies for about 20 years, and biochemist Sharad Purohit has spent 10 years looking for those early clues from the disease in their blood work.
“We have analyzed close to 10,000 samples,” he said. “We started with a lot of proteins and narrowed it down (to just a handful).”
The latest candidate is called interleukin-1 receptor agonist, or IL-1Ra for short. The protein appears to inhibit the action of interleukin-1beta, Purohit said.
“It’s important because IL-1beta is the major protein that is involved in every kind of inflammation,” he said. “If you cannot stop the action of IL-1beta, the cell goes toward the inflammatory (state) and then it becomes an autoimmune state” in which the body’s immune system begins to attack its own cells.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. There is an Interleukin-1Ra drug already being in Europe and the U.S. to treat rheumatoid arthritis, Purohit said.
It has some side effects and probably would not be suitable to give to children as a preventive medicine, She said.
“But if it works, it’s possible to design small molecule drugs to replace the (same) protein,” Purohit said.
“That’s really our goal.”
Purohit has a $500,000 grant from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to study the Il-1Ra protein and its potential as an early marker of disease development because cells make it at the same time as the inflammatory protein.
She stressed that the grant is to help test that hypothesis and that it is only a hypothesis.
There is already a drug approved by the FDA, however, and the preliminary data seem promising.
“There is a drug that is FDA-approved and the evidence we have indicates that this might be a way to prevent the disease,” She said.
“It is not only just a marker it is a potential therapy that should be tested and evaluated by clinical trials.”
That is still encouraging to Daly, who is co-chairwoman of the Augusta Walk to Cure Diabetes, which last year raised $46,000.
Carter was only 20 months old when his insatiable thirst caused her to worry and eventually get him tested.
Having type 1 diabetes is the only life he has ever known, Daly said.
“That’s probably a positive for him,” she said. “He doesn’t know any other way.”
Being able to raise money for research means there is a chance that can change in the future, she said.
“It’s exciting,” she said. “For us it’s the piece that gives us hope and it gives us some sort of power. There is so much about this disease that we’re powerless” to control.
That it is happening in a lab in Augusta is icing on the cake for local families, Daly said.
“Our dollars are coming right back here,” she said.
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Copyright © 2011, The Augusta Chronicle, Ga.
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