Tawnya Galland can hold a ruler perpendicular from her hip to demonstrate how much her waistline has shrunk.

"There's a ruler less of me," she quipped.

The process began almost four years ago when a co-worker invited her to come along to a nutrition class at the YMCA. Galland figured she had nothing to lose, so she tagged along.

It was fortuitous. The nutrition class they attended was the Diabetes Prevention Program, a joint project between St. Vincent Healthcare and the YMCA.

Heavy and not very active, Galland was pre-diabetic, and she likely would have ended up with type 2 diabetes had she not followed her friend to the class and begun to change her life.

"We give people some broad guidelines," said Bev McHugh, the YMCA's registered dietitian and lifestyle coach for the diabetes prevention program.

In the class, she teaches participants about the importance of diet and exercise, helps them to create food journals where they track everything they eat and talks to them about the importance of finding balance in their lives. And then a relatively intensive exercise portion kicks in after the first month.

In other words, she said, she gives them some tools and teaches participants how to use them. But it's those in the class who have to make it work.

"To sustain a healthy lifestyle, people have to take ownership," McHugh said.

Galland was on board from the start, although she admits when she learned there was an exercise component she got a little nervous. She was all too aware of what it would look like for someone her size to saunter into a fitness center.

"Walking into a gym can be overwhelming," she said. "But you're all starting pretty much at the same level. So that was the benefit to doing it in a group."

And rather than starting straight out on exercise equipment, Galland was able to use the pool and work out in a water aerobics class.

"When you weigh as much as a linebacker, your joints don't like the land classes," she said with a laugh.

The biggest surprise was that she enjoyed it. She meticulously kept up her food diary, exercised multiple times a week and eventually lost 44 inches from her waistline.

These days, she's doing a spin class three times a week, a two-hour swim class twice a week and one group aerobics class on Saturdays. She finds genuine pleasure from the workouts, saying they're as good for her head as they are for her heart.

"I'm not happy when I haven't made it to the gym," she said.

McHugh talks to her class about the myriad ways there are to mark success. It's not just about pounds lost or physical endurance gained.

"There's many measures of progress," she said.

Most important, she said, is giving class participants tools that will help them keep in place the lifestyle changes they make when they finish the course.

McHugh likes to tell her class that she can't motivate them but that she can help them find their motivation.

ForGalland, that motivation comes from a desire not to lose the progress she's made and from the positive changes she's experienced in her life. Her mood has improved along with her health. She's more energetic throughout the day, and she has more confidence.

"I don't want to go backwards," she said. "It scares me to go backwards."

The diabetes prevention program lasts a year. It starts with 16 weekly classes, then moves to classes every other week. Then, for the last six months of the class, participants meet once a month. Through it all, there's the exercise regimen.

The best way to prevent diabetes is to improve diet and get active, McHugh said. Those improvements can be charted through weight loss.

"The goal of the program is moderate weight loss," she said, which is defined as a 5 percent to 10 percent loss from a person's starting weight.

Galland has dropped 103 pounds over the last three years, and she's happy with the balance she's struck in her life. Had she tried to do this 10 years ago, she wouldn't have been able to pull it off. Her life simply wasn't in the right place at the time.

"You have to find that place in your life when it'll work," she said. "I'm content with where I'm at."

View original post here:
'I don't want to go backwards': Woman beats diabetes before she gets it with help of YMCA class - Billings Gazette

By Savannah Edgens Special to The Ledger

A group of University of Florida health researchers has found a way to expand andpreserve certain cord-blood cells, which could prove to be a treatment for Type I diabetes.

The findings involved regulatory cells known as T-cells, which are white blood cells thatsupport the immune system and protect against diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Theresearch revealed that the T-cells can be frozen, then multiplied in a laboratory.

This is an incremental step forward on our long pathway toward our ultimate goal ofpreventing and reversing Type I, said Dr. Michael Haller, professor and chief of pediatricendocrinology at the UF College of Medicine.

People with Type I diabetes likely have an imbalance in two types of T-cells: regulatoryand effecter, Haller said. If a person doesnt have enough regulatory T-cells or the regulatorycells arent doing their job, then it allows the effecter cells to take over. The regulatory cellsthen attack the effecter cells.

If we can shift the balance by giving more regulatory T-cells that are either morefunctional or more potent, then we might be able to reverse the primary cause of autoimmunediseases, Haller said.

The next step will be to conduct clinical trials, Haller said. The clinical trials will involvegrowing the cells from stored cord blood, then injecting the cells back into patients. Funding isthe biggest thing keeping the research team from conducting the trials. The clinical trials willcost $1 million to $1.5 million, Haller said.

The regulatory cells are not insulin-producing cells, Haller said. They will not replacedamaged pancreas cells. The goal is to fix the immune problem. The expansion of T-cells, Haller said, could also be used to help a number of other autoimmune diseases.

Cell therapy is a living drug, and it is very different from a pill a person might take, saidTodd Brusko, associate professor of pathology at the UF College of Medicine. It is somethingyour body has developed over time as a way to control immune responses.

I think whats really unique about our approach, Brusko said, is that we areharnessing the bodys own systems to control immune responses, and using those to interferewith this disease process.

Patients with Type I diabetes have some kind of underlying autoimmune disease, Bruskosaid. Even if they received a new pancreas, the body would recognize it as foreign, and thebody would attack it. This was the goal of the research, he said, to fix the underlying issue.

Diabetes is a devastating disease for families, Brusko said. Its a family disease becauseit impacts every aspect of a persons life. They have to worry about how high or low their bloodsugar will be when they go to sleep at night.

If you can imagine a very young child being woken up in the middle of the night to havetheir blood sugar checked, that can be incredibly stressful for a family, Brusko said. This issomething that is 24/7.

Link:
UF Health diabetes researchers multiply T-cells - News Chief

Local scientists have worked for decades to develop technology that could cure diabetes. Consultant John Mills (left), Bri Bintz, Moses Goddard, Chris Thanos. Photography by James Jones.

Leonard Thompson was fourteen years old and near death when he helped make medical history. It was 1922, and though what became known as diabetes dated back to ancient times the Chinese called it sugar urine disease the only treatment for the illness at the time was the starvation diet.

Thompson weighed sixty-five pounds when he was admitted to Toronto General Hospital. A young surgeon named Dr. Frederick Banting convinced his father to let him inject his son with a new drug he was testing in dogs called insulin. Thompsons health improved dramatically, and news of the medical miracle made the front pages of newspapers around the globe. The next year, the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly began making insulin to treat diabetes.

But though the technology for treating the disease has improved over time, for an estimated three million Americans many of them children a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes remains a life sentence. They manage it by monitoring their blood sugar throughout the day and administering insulin. But severe complications later in life can include heart disease, blindness, nerve damage and even amputation. The disease costs an estimated $15 billion a year to treat.

Thats why researchers and investors have long considered finding a way to transplant cells that could regulate insulin without getting rejected by the immune system, a holy grail. Scientists in Rhode Island are among those who have been working on and off for decades on achieving it.

About three years ago, Harvards Stem Cell Institute announced a major breakthrough in the fight against diabetes. The institutes co-founder, Dr. Doug Melton, and a team of scientists said that using embryonic stem cells, they were able to develop islets clusters of pancreatic cells that house beta cells and produce insulin in a healthy pancreas.

The transplantable tissue, which they tested in mice, opened the door to a potential treatment that would enable diabetics to once again naturally regulate their own blood sugar. It was gratifying to know that we could do something that we always thought was possible, Melton said at the time, but many people felt it wouldnt work. If we had shown this was not possible, then I would have had to give up on this whole approach. Now Im really energized.

Melton had dedicated himself to finding a cure for the disease more than twenty-five years before, when his then-infant son, Sam, and then later his daughter, Emma, were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. While the cause of type 1 diabetes isnt known, genetics are believed to play a role.

With venture capitalist Robert Millman, Melton founded a startup called Semma Therapeutics named for Sam and Emma to develop the technology for an artificial pancreas and bring it to market. It attracted nearly $50 million in investment from Millmans firm MPM Capital, medical companies Novartis and Medtronic and later, the California Stem Cell Association.

But its a very competitive landscape. Other companies are also working on the creation of artificial pancreases, including California-based VitaCite, which already has clinical trials scheduled.

In addition to creating the islets, scientists also have to figure out a way to keep a persons immune system from rejecting them. Thats where the scientists and clinicians in Rhode Island come in. Using a method called encapsulated cell technology (ECT), they are developing a semi-permeable membrane to house the islets that will allow oxygen and glucose to diffuse through it, but that the patients body wont reject.

Trying to make that work has occupied scientists in Rhode Island and around the world for more than three decades. In 2015, Semma recruited some of the most prominent people working in ECT in Rhode Island Dr. Moses Goddard, Christopher Thanos, John Mills and Briannan Bintz to develop the technology for Meltons islets. Over the next few years, they plan to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials with the hope that one day, surgeons can implant healthy new tissue that can regulate insulin in diabetic patients.

But despite the excitement about the prospect of developing a way to potentially cure type 1 diabetes, those involved acknowledge that if it were easy, it would have happened long ago. The public definitely doesnt appreciate that much of science is a failure, Melton told MIT Technology Review last year.

One of the pioneers in the development of the method that could change the treatment of diabetes was a transplant from Switzerland named Dr. Pierre Galletti. An internationally known scientist, Galletti was the first dean of biology and medicine at Brown University and one of the founders of its medical school.

Galletti worked to develop synthetic solutions for failing organs. He also had an entrepreneurial streak. Galletti published the first really significant paper on ECT in the journal Science in 1973, and it caused a big splash, Goddard recalls.

Galletti advanced the idea that ECT could be used to help treat type 1 diabetes. In healthy people, islets in the pancreas create insulin and secrete it into the blood stream. But in people with type 1 diabetes, the bodys immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells. And when they dont make enough insulin, glucose builds up in the blood.

The idea behind ECT was that scientists could use beta cells from another source at the time Galletti was using pigs and put them in an envelope designed to protect them from a persons immune system, then transplant the cells into the pancreas. And the membrane should be porous enough that blood sugar could diffuse through it and affect the beta cells, and the beta cells could respond with insulin.

Galletti performed the first experiment with ECT on a human in 1983, in what Goddard describes as the good old days/bad old days of medicine. The patient was a French nephrologist with type 1 diabetes who was in end-stage kidney failure. Galletti worked with a French endocrine surgeon who extracted islets from an islet tumor. The nephrologist already had an access shunt for dialysis, so Gallettis lab at Brown built a device with the islets that could be plugged into the shunt.

The doctors took the nephrologist off insulin. He enjoyed a proper French meal with several courses and wine as the doctors measured his blood sugar and treated his diabetes for twenty-four hours.

That was the kind of thing you did as experiments back in the day, says Goddard, who was a protege of Gallettis, along with Patrick Aebischer. Aebischer had earned degrees in medicine and neuroscience in Switzerland before coming to Brown. Goddard, a descendant of the founder of Rhode Island Hospital, had earned undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown. They also recruited a mechanical mind named John Mills.

Meanwhile, some companies were already making commercial versions of membranes to encapsulate cells for a variety of medical purposes. Goddard and Aebischer were consulting for a company that was manufacturing membranes for dialysis cartridges when they realized they could make their own.

The company had maintained that creating the membranes was an extremely complex process that required great expertise and hundreds of employees, Goddard recalls. One day, he and Aebischer had a meeting at the company to discuss the diameter of the membranes they were looking for. A junior employee took them on a tour, and Goddard and Aebischer were allowed to see where the membranes were being made. It was a small room for controlled experiments and they couldnt see the actual process. But Goddard and Aebischer were convinced that it couldnt be too hard to figure out how to make their own membranes.

Patrick dove into the patent literature and figured out what they did, Goddard says. We replicated it and really mastered it.

Originally posted here:
Will Rhode Island Win the Race to Cure Diabetes? - Rhode Island Monthly

Sanofi has teamed up with Exscientia to discover and develop bispecific small molecules that treat diabetes and its comorbidities. The agreement will see Sanofi hand over up to 250 million ($274 million) in return for small molecules designed to hit two targets involved in glucose control, NASH, weight management and other areas relevant to diabetics.

Exscientias role is to identify pairs of targets and generate bispecific small molecules against them. These drugs will have properties similar to those of typical small moleculesweight of under 500 daltons, suitable for oral deliverybut be designed to hit two different targets. The potential of such a dual-pronged attack is said to have turned heads at Sanofi.

What they were excited by was the possibility of really being creative about the target product profile, Exscientia CEO Andrew Hopkins, D.Phil., said.

Some of the drugs could hit two targets in the same pathway to trigger a synergistic effect. Others could go after targets associated with distinct pathways to help diabeticsmanage two aspects of their health. Hopkins gavethe example of a drug that controls glucose levels while also helping the patient to manage their weight to show the potential of the approach. The range of conditions common to diabetics means many other such combinations are theoretically possible.

Sanofi will provide research funding, up to 250 million in milestones and royalties as the drug candidates advance. The Big Pharma is putting up the cash in a bid to unearth small molecules that stand out in the congested diabetes space and in doing so deliver drugs that improve outcomes and reduce the pill burden on patients.

The partners will work together at the discovery stage, with Exscientia handling compound design and Sanofi providing chemical synthesis support. Sanofi will then take full control of candidates that are promising enough to push forward, handling further assays, preclinical development and clinical trials solo.

The work is made possible by the algorithms Exscientia has created and the drug hunters it has brought on board to build on their output. In the case of the Sanofi deal, the research process entailed listing targets relevant to diabetes and associated conditions. Having identified around 45 individual targets, Exscientia and Sanofi had close to 1,000 possible pairs. Exscientia then used its technology to filter out the many combinations that are chemically intractable.

The algorithm is actually designing novel molecules, Hopkins said. This is the big difference between the platform Exscientia has been developing and many previous computational chemistry approaches.

Earlier attempts to apply algorithms to drug discovery typically limited themselves to screening databases of existing drugs for hits against targets or providing support todrug designers. Exscientias goal is to have a platform that explores the chemical space and proposes molecules, beyond which humans step in to assess the robustness and drug-like properties of the candidates. The chief chemist overseeing this second stage of the process at Exscientia is Andy Bell, co-inventor of Pfizers Viagra.

Exscientia and Sanofi are now moving molecules discovered by the platform into the experimental phase. And, with an earlier CNS collaboration with Sumitomo Dainippon on the cusp of moving a bispecific small molecule into the clinic, Exscientia has decided to to break cover after a low-profile first four years of existence. Having done so, Exscientia is looking to keep itself in the limelight.

This is the first of several deals which we're announcing this year, Hopkins said.

The deals will allow Exscientia to apply its technology to a wider range of therapeutic areas than its internal operationcan handle. Exscientia is focusing its own pipeline on immuno-oncology, notably through a collaboration with Evotec that gives it access to the medicinal chemistry capabilities of the Toulouse, France, site the CRO picked up from Sanofi. As the platform is applicable outside of this niche, Exscientia plans to partner to apply it to other therapeutic areas.

See the original post here:
Sanofi inks 250M bispecific small molecule diabetes deal - FierceBiotech

Posted on May 9, 2017 | 1:38 p.m.

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Hosts Wine-ing for the Cure Fundraiser May 21 event set at Greengate Ranch & Vineyard in SLO

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will host Wine-ing For the Cure, a Central Coast fundraiser to raise awareness and support research for those impacted by Type 1 diabetes. The event is May 21 at Greengate Ranch & Vineyard, San Luis Obispo.

Ticket sales close Wednesday, May 10.

The event will include a cocktail reception, gourmet dinner and local wines, along with live music, and live and silent auctions. All proceeds benefit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to support the prevention, treatment, and cure for Type 1 diabetes.

VIP entrance begins at 4 p.m, followed by general admission entry at 5 p.m. VIP tickets are $175; general admission is $120.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease in which a persons pancreas loses the ability to produce insulin, a hormone essential to turning food into energy. It strikes both children and adults suddenly and is unrelated to diet and lifestyle.

There are 1.25 million Americans who have T1D, including about 200,000 youth (younger than 20 years old) and more than a million adults (20 and older). Each year, 40,000 children and adults are diagnosed with T1D.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation's mission is to accelerate breakthroughs to cure, prevent and treat T1D by investing nearly $2 billion in research funding and connecting with local communities, such as those on the Central Coast.

For more information on JDRF and T1D, visit diabetesfoundation.jdrf.com.

To buy event tickets, contact Kara Hornbuckle, 448-6924 or via email at [emailprotected]

Laurie DeSchryver for Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Read the original post:
Fundraiser Targets Type 1 Diabetes - Noozhawk

WILLIAMSON MEDICAL CENTER

Merle Sousa remembers watching his mother slip into a diabeticcoma, so when his physician told him last year that his weight was going to push him straightinto having diabetes himself, he knew he had to make a change.

Last August, he somewhat reluctantly enrolled in Williamson Medical Centers DiabetesPrevention Program and says what he has learned has completely changed his life. He has lost 48pounds, but has gained knowledge that he says he will take with him the rest of his life.

This program has been an absolute life-changer for me, he said. I will admit, I went into ita little skeptical, but within weeks I realized this isnt a weight loss program. This is aboutchanging your life so that you dont become a diabetic. You definitely lose weight, but thats notthe focus.

Williamson Medical Centers Diabetes Prevention Program has full recognition by theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention for its proven results in the fight against type 2diabetes, just like Merles.

This designation by the CDC is reserved for programs that have effectively delivered aquality evidence-based program that meets all the CDCs standards for recognition anaccomplishment that is earned by less than 10 percent of sites nationwide.

Once you have diabetes, you cant get rid of it, but if you have prediabetes, which is higherthan normal blood sugar levels, or if you are at risk for developing diabetes, you can prevent itwith lifestyle changes, said Sarah Neil Pilkinton, R.D., who is also a trained lifestyle coach anda Certified Diabetes Educator at Williamson Medical Center. People need to know they havethe power to change their outcome.

WMC is currently enrolling new participants in this free program. If you think youre at riskfor diabetes and youre interested in participating in the program, please call 615-435- 5580.

WMC began its Diabetes Prevention Program in 2013 after receiving a grant from theAmerican Association of Diabetes Educators and the State of Tennessee in partnership with theCDC. Since then, 106 people have successfully completed the year-long program and have lost acombined 1,134 pounds. Nearly half of the participants shed at least 5 percent of their total bodyweight, which studies have shown is enough to prevent or delay the risk of diabetes.

The CDC estimates as many as one in three people could have diabetes by 2050. TheDiabetes Prevention Program proved that participants who lost a modest amount of weightthrough dietary changes and increased physical activity reduced their chances of developingdiabetes by 58 percent, which is a better outcome than taking medication.

Common risk factors for diabetes include being 10 to 15 pounds over your ideal weight,having a previous diagnosis of prediabetes or gestational diabetes, or having family memberswith the disease.

The Diabetes Prevention Program provides a year of education and support with a trainedlifestyle coach for people who are at risk for developing diabetes but have not yet beendiagnosed with the disease. Participants gather in a relaxed classroom setting and work togetherin small groups to learn how to incorporate healthier eating and moderate physical activity intotheir daily lives. The program is led by a trained lifestyle coach. Over a one-year period, theparticipants meet weekly for one hour a week for the first six months, followed by six months ofmaintenance sessions.

Williamson Medical Centers Diabetes Prevention Program is currently enrolling anyonewho thinks he or she may be at risk and is interested in participating in the program. To registeror find out if you qualify for the program, contact the Diabetes Prevention Program at 615-435-5580.

View post:
At risk for diabetes? Life changes can help you avoid it - Franklin Home Page