A world-first human trial of an immunotherapy drug to treat type 1 diabetes patients has begun after decades of work by an Australian scientist. The drug is designed to rebalance the body's immune response to protect insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. It's early days but if trial is a success, it could be rolled out to a wider cohort of people.
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00:00It's really managing every minute of every day, trying to ensure that the blood sugar
00:07is under control, that the doses of insulin are correct, that you can manage your food
00:13and your exercise.
00:16And then there's the ongoing problems of potential issues arising with health as time goes on.
00:22Professor, you've been developing this new treatment for type 1 diabetes for, I believe,
00:26two and a half decades now.
00:28How does it work?
00:29What does it aim to do?
00:31So it's a problem of the immune system where the immune system attacks the cells that make
00:39insulin in the body, in the pancreas.
00:41So we've taken one of the proteins from the cells that make the insulin and combined it
00:46with an immune calming drug, vitamin D, into a little package.
00:50And then the package goes under the skin as a skin injection to patients.
00:54And the idea is that it's a very specific treatment for type 1 diabetes to calm the immune system
01:00at the onset of the disease.
01:01So is that essentially looking at preserving these pancreatic cells?
01:06Correct.
01:06So once they're killed, they can't be brought back.
01:10But I think if we try to go for the very early stages of the disease, or even before the onset
01:16of the disease, when you've got a larger number of these cells in reserve, the aim is to try
01:23to keep them and to keep that patient in as good control or remission if possible.
01:28Okay.
01:28Currently a phase 1 trial, so it is early days.
01:32But what are the early results telling you?
01:34So we've dosed five people so far and everything's going well so far.
01:38So we're blinded.
01:40Nobody knows who's got what treatment so far.
01:42All right.
01:43So is this medication designed to slow the onset of disease or stop it entirely?
01:49Yeah.
01:50So it's to slow the progression of the disease.
01:53And that, you know, we hope will stop the, or really slow down the progression.
01:57Okay.
01:57And so is this just for now, just for adults, or could it be extended towards a wider cohort
02:03of individuals?
02:05Yeah.
02:05So we're recruiting adults now at the moment who've been diagnosed with type 1 within
02:09the last five years.
02:11And with a good outcome from this trial, we aim to go into a childhood trial and then
02:18to expand out so that we can really test the efficacy.
02:22So looking at what it actually does for the diabetes.
02:25And so, I mean, of course, trial 1, you're looking at efficacy and safety for the patients,
02:30et cetera.
02:31But could something like this apply to type 2 diabetes or are they two very different diseases?
02:37Yeah.
02:37So they're different diseases.
02:38Type 1 is the immune type and type 2 is different.
02:43So we've really designed this to be very specific for type 1 diabetes.
02:47Okay.
02:48And from a timeline perspective, Professor, where do you see this going and how long might
02:54it actually become a reality for a greater cohort of Australians?
02:59So we're at the very beginning of the trial journey.
03:01And if we're successful, as I said, we roll it out into progressively more intense trials
03:09so that we can really see whether we can actually prolong that remission.
03:13And in the next phase, we hope to be able to get into people who are just about at the
03:20onset of disease as well as those who have just been diagnosed.
03:23You