Boston researchers studying effects of 125-year-old tuberculosis drug on diabetes
Researchers in Boston are working to determine if an old tuberculosis vaccine could be the key to treating type 1 diabetes.
At just 14-years-old, Cam Power has not known a life without diabetes. "I always have to be careful," he said. He was diagnosed at just 16-months-old.
"[We] went into his room, and he was limp," said Bill Power, Cam's father. "We went into the hospital, and they told us that one of the tests was a little off - the blood glucose. We immediately looked at each other and we said, 'he's got diabetes.'"
Dropped into a world of insulin shots and blood sugar monitoring, Cam has lived with the disease for more than a decade. However, hope may lie in a drug that has been around for more than a century.
Dr. Denise Faustman at Massachusetts General Hospital is leading the charge. "We've been working with the BCG vaccine in total for about 20 years," said Dr. Faustman.
She's talking about the 125-year-old drug, Bacillus Calmette Guérin (BCG) which was originally developed to prevent tuberculosis. All over the world it's being studied as a treatment for a wide range of diseases, but Faustman is studying its off-target effects on diabetes.
"Treatment not prevention"
"We're using it for treatment, not prevention. That's why I'm calling it immunotherapy, not a vaccine," she said. "It's a very important distinction because there's been, over the last 20 years, many prevention trials to try to prevent the blood sugar from ever going up."
According to Faustman, the struggle with current diabetes treatments is that they primarily try to replace white blood cells, whereas this treatment seeks to change them.
"This drug does immunostimulation, and in that process is remolding how genes are expressed," she said.
Type 1 diabetes patients have white blood cells that eat fats. Faustman says the drug teaches those cells to eat sugar instead. "[It's] deep biology on top of a safe, old-fashioned drug," she said.
Pediatric trials underway
Faustman has already completed two adult trials and now her pediatric trials are underway. "All our trials are designed to follow these people long-term, because we want to show with this drug it not only brings down the blood sugar, but it does it for months and years," she said.
It's a future that's within reach for Cam Power. "This trial gives me hope and it gives me kind of confidence," he said. "I can't wait to find a cure."