Word: insulin
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...dispense contraceptive hormones for a year. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are experimenting with dissolvable plastic wafers that are implanted in the brain and slowly release an antitumor drug for cancer victims. The day is not far off when most diabetics will be able to give themselves insulin with a nasal spray. In California doctors are working on drug-loaded bubbles of fat that bind themselves to diseased cells. Says Robert Langer, a biomedical engineer at M.I.T.: "It's an explosive field with enormous potential...
Although he is a diabetic who gives himself a shot of insulin twice a day, Roemer has been working 14-hour days seven days a week. He is trying to abolish 100 of the state's 415 boards and commissions while cutting 16,000 people from the state's 75,000-person payroll over four years. He is pressing for tighter environmental laws and increased spending for education, including a 5% pay raise for teachers...
Type 1 diabetes, for example, which afflicts 1.5 million Americans and is brought on by an insufficient supply of insulin, was for years believed to be caused by a virus. Researchers have now shown that it probably results from a defective immune system. For reasons that are not yet clear, immune cells invade the pancreas and destroy the beta cells, which produce insulin. When this happens, the body cannot convert sugar into the energy that cells need to function. The cells starve, and the unconverted sugar builds up in the bloodstream, damaging the fragile lining of blood vessels. Complications associated...
However incomplete, the emerging understanding of the immune system's role in Type 1 diabetes has led to an experimental treatment. In Canada and Europe, researchers have weaned diabetics from their insulin shots after giving them cyclosporine, a drug used in organ transplants to suppress the immune system. Doses of cyclosporine, which works by dampening T-cell attacks on the beta cells, have provided dramatic results: many patients have been able to discontinue their insulin shots for up to a year. Still, by undermining the entire immune system, cyclosporine leaves the diabetic more vulnerable to other diseases. And when given...
...immune discoveries and promising therapies have been reported. Researchers announced in March that by activating certain immune cells, they had increased by 20% the five-year survival rate of patients in the early stages of lung cancer. In the same month, European scientists reported eliminating the need for insulin shots in some diabetic children by administering a drug that suppresses the immune system. Researchers in Colombia have tested a malaria vaccine that, unlike previous efforts, seems to provide protection against the disease. Advances have come so fast, says Dana-Farber's Benacerraf, that "we're now on the threshold...