The Use of Gene Therapy in Mice to Reverse the Effects of Type One Diabetes

Abstract

Diabetes is a problem that many people all over the world are battling every day. Many of the people who have diabetes have type two diabetes. Type two diabetes usually occurs in people who are overweight, where their bodies still produce insulin, but their bodies cannot keep and make enough insulin to keep their blood glucose levels at a proper level. On the other hand, type one diabetes is an autoimmune disease where the bodies T-Cells attack to insulin cells produced by the pancreas, which leaves the body with no insulin production. For many years scientists have performed studies on how to cure type one diabetes. There have been multiple studies on how a type one diabetic patient can receive a new pancreas, where sometimes this can reverse the effects of diabetes, but this is not a readily available procedure that many people have access too. Although a cure has not yet been found, in the past few years there have been many great advances and steps toward finding a cure. The recent studies that have been performed in the field of diabetes have been performed on mice, where now, gene therapy is the main focus of many experiments. Many experiments that have been conducted all over the world have concluded that gene therapy in mice can reverse the effects of type one diabetes. Many of the studies conducted did not publish their results until they knew the effects of the gene therapy and if it would last for a long period of time. Many of the studies performed on mice showed that the gene therapy still reversed the effects of type one diabetes a whole year later.  The question many scientists face is whether or not this gene therapy will have a lasting impact on the reversal of type one diabetes or if the gene therapy done on the mice will cause different problems elsewhere in the body.