Immunotherapy of Type I Diabetes Mellitus

Excerpt

In most patients, type I diabetes results from autoimmune beta-cell destruction in the setting of a genetically determined predisposition (1). Approximately 95% of patients with type I diabetes express HLA antigens DR3 or DR4 or both (2), and within families, siblings with type I diabetes have in common at least one and often both HLA-haplotypes (3). In many patients, anti-islet antibodies precede overt diabetes. Several assays for anti-islet antibodies have been developed but the only assay that has shown prognostic significance measures binding of antibodies to non-fixed, frozen sections of normal human pancreas (4-8). Only a few research centers have