Shiva Reddy, Lars Krogvold, Charlton Martin, Rebecca Holland, Jaimin Choi, Hannah Woo, Fiona Wu and Knut Dahl-Jørgensen published a paper entitled ‘Distribution of IL-1β immunoreactive cells in pancreatic biopsies from living volunteers with new-onset type 1 diabetes: comparison with donors without diabetes and with longer duration of disease‘
This paper has been published in Diabetologia, a high impact international diabetes journal (2017 impact factor: 6.08). Charlton Martin (currently year 4 MBChB student) made an important contribution to the study with Shiva’s previous MBChB undergraduate summer students (Rebecca Holland, Jaimin Choi and Hannah Woo). Dr Fiona Wu, Diabetes Consultant at Auckland District Health Board is a co-investigator and clinical advisor. This is a large collaborative study with colleagues from Oslo University Hospital. All laboratory work, cell analysis and manuscript preparation were conducted here.
Previous studies have shown that interleukin-1β (IL-1β), a key proinflammatory cytokine, together with tumour necrosis factor-α or interferon-γ, damages insulin-producing beta cells in isolated human islets maintained in culture.
However, recent clinical trials in Europe and United States, aimed at neutralizing IL-1β in recently-diagnosed subjects to preserve beta cells and their function have not shown the expected efficacy.
This clinical inefficacy led Shiva and his co-authors to examine the expression of this cytokine within islets from diabetic subjects and to ask if it is expressed at a sufficient level to contribute to beta cell destruction during human type 1 diabetes.
They have, therefore, analysed rare pancreatic tissues from human donors with new-onset type 1 diabetes and with longer duration of disease and have shown that its expression in close proximity to islets from diabetic donors is low.
In this paper, it is proposed that IL-1β, when present at low concentrations near or within islets, may have a supportive rather than a deleterious role in humans with type 1 diabetes.
Read the paper