A shot of hope for type 1 diabetic dogs

Fatima Bosch and other researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona showed a hopeful way to cure diabetes in large animals by a single session of gene therapy in MedicalNewsToday. The research was published in the journal Diabetes, and showed that when the dogs with diabetes were given one gene therapy session they no longer showed symptoms of diabetes. Some dogs were supervised for over four years after the therapy and they had no reappearance of symptoms. The therapy has various injections in the animal’s back legs with simple needles to introduce the gene therapy vectors. The objectives of the vectors are to assert the insulin gene and the glucokinase gene, so that both genes can act as a glucose sensor and regulate the amount of glucose from the blood. The research group first tested this successfully on mice, and then moved on to bigger animals in hopes to find a way to cure it in more species. When dogs were treated with the single gene therapy they showed better glucose control than of dogs with daily insulin injections, while eating or fasting. The dogs with the gene therapy had no episodes of hypoglycemia and had improved in body weight with no complications even four years after the treatment. This is the first study to show a long term success with the control of glucose in dogs with diabetes. Webmd expressed that the dogs with diabetes in the study modeled the human type 1 diabetes.