title: Immunotherapeutic treatment of autoimmune diabetes.
abstract: Type 1 diabetes is a prototypic, organ-specific autoimmune disease. Diverse antigen-specific immunotherapy using insulin or glutamic acid decarboxylase peptides and other immunotherapies, such as antibodies, fusion proteins, cytokines, regulatory T cells, small-molecule inhibitors, nonspecific immune modulators, or dietary modifications, have been attempted in human type 1 diabetes. Some of these immunotherapies delay the onset of diabetes or reduce insulin requirements or blood glucose level in patients with established type 1 diabetes. However, most of these immunotherapies failed to induce complete remission of established type 1 diabetes, which could be due to 1) technical difficulties in the achievement of immune tolerance to diabetic autoantigens or in the inhibition of autoimmune responses to those antigens that can be applied to human patients without significant adverse effects, and 2) markedly reduced β-cell mass at the time of disease onset that should be replenished. This review focuses on the immunological aspects of the disease and its treatment, and data from previous or ongoing human clinical trials using immune-logical measures, and recent results from immunological studies employing animal models are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Kyunggi-do 410-773, Korea.
authors.forename: Jae Hyeon
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Sang-Man
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: Hun Sik
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Kyoung-Ah
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Myung-Shik
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000906:Antibodies / Q000276:immunology; D001324:Autoantigens / Q000276:immunology; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003922:Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 / Q000276:immunology / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D007167:Immunotherapy; D007515:Islets of Langerhans / Q000276:immunology
chemical_list: D000906:Antibodies; D001324:Autoantigens