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DRI Presentation – Reaching the Biological Cure: Resolving the Remaining Challenges

A few weeks ago I received an email from the DRI about a presentation that they would be doing in south Florida that was practically walking distance from where I live (well, if I was exercising the way that I should, it would be walking distance!).  I knew that I would definitely have to RSVP and attend the event so that I could get some more information about the BioHub and hopefully share some information from those that are not keeping up to date with the DRI.

I know that a lot of you are still upset and have a bad taste in your mouth whenever the word BioHub or Biological Cure is used.  I also think that we all had a reason to be upset, but I’m not a big believer in just complaining about the past, I’m more worried about creating the future.

With that being said, I wanted to see where the DRI was with the BioHub project, so here is a cleaned up version of the notes that I took during the presentation.

When I first got to the event location and signed in, the first person I saw was Antonello Pileggi. I  spoke to him briefly (he was the presenter) and he talked about there being updates and they wanted to hold presentation to provide updates. He mentioned that they wish they could move faster because, but there are parts that are time consuming.

I was by far the youngest person at the presentation, except for one kid probably under the age of 13.  The primaril age was over 50-55 years old (I probably shouldn’t be guessing people’s ages). I could over hear a lot of conversations being had about grandchildren having type one and that they didn’t have diabetes but were there to learn more for their grandchildren.

The presentation opening up with President, CEO Joshua Rednik introducing himself. He does not have diabetes anywhere in his life, but did a great job explaining his journey of becoming the President of DRI.  I personally do not mind that he is not affected by diabetes in his personal life because sometimes decisions are better made from a business frame of mind than they are emotionally.

Next up was Antonello Pileggi.

He is a scientist, so scientists usually talk fast and most of the time, I do not understand what they are are talking about, so I will be asking for clarification, and hopefully a guest post from Antonello himself about the presentation.

When it comes to diabetes research and the scientific and biological stuff, I need things simplified, so one great image that was presented was that Insulin and glucagon are the ying and yang of diabetes control.

There were a lot of slides about the need for control and there was a graph of a J that reflected that tight control led to less retinopathy and other “pathy”‘s, but then there was a shift where too tight of control can lead to seizures, death, etc.  This is something that I was previously familiar with, but as I mentioned above, I’m not 100% sure what the knowledge of the attendees were, I’m assuming pretty darn high based off the questions asked.

One very cool slide that was shown to use was a bunch of images of different islets (pig, monkey, human, rodent) and how they have similarities and differences and why these differences are why rodents have been cured, but not humans.  One neato piece of information given was that there have been no known occurrences of type 1 diabetes in monkeys.  If they have T1D in the wild, they don’t survive and none have been reported within zoos.

There was some data, that was passed over too quickly before I could type it all up about the numbers on the amount of orgons that are donated.  Basically, the pancreas is pretty much the lowest donated organ.  This led to a brief discussion about the JDRF nPOD relationship.  I was not familiar with this and do not know much about it, so if you do, please leave a comment below.

Remember when I said there is a lot of biological / scientific stuff that I don’t quite understand?  Well, here is one of them.  I do plan on doing a bit of reading on this topic, but just wanted to share at least some of it so maybe you can do the same.

There was a discussion that  IL-2 at low doses may promote regulation of the immune system and control autoimmunity in type 1 diabetes.

What is IL-2?

It stimulates immune cells and their functions……sorry but that’s about as far as I got on that. (Please remember, I am looking to get further details regarding these topics).

A little more about the BioHub was discussed.

The omentum is the area they want to transplant islets. Using Thrombin which creates plasma gel. Then fold omentum over and basically create a sandwich. (Like how technical I’m making this?)

There was a brief Q&A at the end of the presentation and I did not want to post any of these answers until I did get some clarification from the DRI.

If any of what I just wrote above is totally wrong, then please let me know.  Like I said, I am writing this from my perspective and my level of knowledge.  I will not pretend to be a scientific writer and to completely understand the biological side of this disease.

Check back for some follow ups on some of the items mentioned above.