Bad News: Cheap Cure for Type 1 Diabetes Found

Bad News: Cheap Cure for Type 1 Diabetes Found


Bloomberg reports: Diabetes May Be Reversed by Long-Used Vaccine for TB

A tuberculosis vaccine in use for 90 years may help reverse Type 1 diabetes and eliminate the life-long need for insulin injections, say Harvard University researchers raising money to conduct large, human studies.

Why bad news? Because no drug company likes to hear about a discovery that kills their business. VCs in Sillicon valley do not want it, because there is no big IPO theft from public at the end.

Faustman and her colleagues at Massachusetts General in Boston are working to get the vaccine to market. After their early findings in studies with mice, she said they tried to interest every major drugmaker in developing the vaccine as a possible cure for diabetes. All told her there wasnt enough money to be made in a cure that used an inexpensive, generically available vaccine, Faustman said.

So now, she is trying to raise money to pay for the expensive larger human trials. Her lab so far has received $11 million of the $25 million needed to pay for the next stage of testing. All of the money is coming from private donors, the largest of which is the Iacocca Family Foundation.

The only silver lining is that the authors published their groundbreaking discovery in PLOS One, not Nature. A victory for ‘open source’ publishing?



Written by M. //