Researchers from the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that immune responses to insulin could help identify individuals most at risk for developing type 1 diabetes. 

The study, out recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured immune responses from individuals genetically predisposed to developing type 1 diabetes to naturally occurring insulin and hybrid insulin peptides.

Since not all genetically predisposed individuals develop type 1 diabetes, researchers sought to examine T-cell immune responses from the peripheral blood that could occur before the onset of clinical diabetes.

“We want to know why people develop type 1 diabetes, and this research has helped provide a lot more information and data as to what it looks like when genetically at-risk individuals are headed towards clinical diagnosis,” says Aaron Michels, MD, the study’s lead researcher, Associate Professor of Medicine at CU Anschutz and researcher at the Barbara Davis Center.

“Ideally, you want to treat a disease when it’s active, so this is a need in our field to understand when people have an immune response directed against insulin producing cells.”