Researchers Discover Antibody Used to Detect Diabetes

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AURORA, CO -- October 17, 2007-- Researchers at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center's School of Medicine have discovered a fourth antibody in human blood which will help more accurately predict who is predisposed to type 1 diabetes.

The findings will be posted online the week of Oct. 15 and will be published in the Oct. 23 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that develops when the body's immune system mistakenly targets the pancreas, killing the cells that make insulin. Currently, antibodies in the blood are measured to diagnose diabetes before its onset through a simple blood test. Three antibodies are routinely measured giving a 90% chance of predicting disease. With the discovery of this fourth autoantibody, ZnT8, the prediction rate jumps to 96%.

\"This is incredibly exciting for us since this new target is the first to be discovered in 10 years,\" said John Hutton, PhD, research director at the Barbara Davis Center and senior author of the paper. \"ZnT8 shows great value as a diagnostic tool and we believe testing for it will very quickly become routine in all of the ongoing clinical research studies. For example, this fourth autoantigen will find immediate use in identifying individuals with a family history of diabetes or a genetic predisposition to the disease for recruitment into clinical trials aimed at preventing diabetes.\"

Blood from children who had been studied from birth to the onset of the disease as part of Diabetes Autoimmunity Study in the Young (DAISY) at the Barbara Davis Center were analyzed along with hundreds of newly-diagnosed patients and their unaffected relatives as controls. Seventy% of diabetics test positive for the antibody versus less than one% of controls.

ZnT8 was chosen from thousands of candidates using microarray analysis, a method that catalogs the level of expression of all the genes in the body on a tissue-by-tissue basis. ZnT8 stuck out as a protein that was only expressed in insulin secreting cells and associated with the mechanism of insulin release, making it a good candidate on which to follow up.

\"Ultimately, we'd like to be able to prevent diabetes from occurring in the first place,\" said Hutton. \"It could be possible by catching it in the very early stages and then manipulating the immune system. ZnT8 itself might be part of that therapy since it has been shown in diabetes-prone mice that administering antigen as a vaccine can prevent disease, a similar approach that is currently used to counter allergies. We also hope that the same genomics-based approach will be applicable to other autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus.\"

Hutton and his team believe they will eventually be able to define further autoantigens using the same procedures and raise the predictive value of combined autoantibody tests to the required accuracy rate of 99.7%. If so, they will then be able to achieve the ultimate goal of preventing diabetes through screening very young children in the general population and catching the disease in its earliest stages.

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研究者发现用于检测糖尿病的抗体
2007年10月17日----Barbara Davis儿童糖尿病中心和丹佛科罗拉多大学以及医学院保健研究中心的研究者在人血中发现了第四个能更准确预测易患1型糖尿病的抗体。