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Source: Wallace Ravven
415-476-2557
20 September 2000
Prominent immunologist and leader in diabetes research joins UCSF study
Jeffrey A. Bluestone, PhD, one of the world's leading experts on why the body's immune system rejects or tolerates transplanted tissue, has been appointed to a new professorship at the University of California, San Francisco devoted to diabetes research.
Bluestone is recognized internationally for his contributions toward clarifying the biological basis of immune tolerance. He is perhaps best known for molecular-level approaches to control the immune activity of antibodies and boost the beneficial effects of tolerance-inducing drugs. This research has stimulated recent progress in islet cell transplantation for treating Type 1 diabetes.
He will head up the UCSF Diabetes Center, one of only a few diabetes programs nationwide to combine the best available patient care and education with aggressive basic research on the causes of and potential cures for the disease. For example, efforts are under way at UCSF to understand how islet cells -- the insulin factories in the pancreas -- develop and to understand why these cells become targets for destruction by the immune system.
Bluestone's appointment is expected to strengthen and accelerate research on diabetes and other autoimmune diseases at UCSF and quicken the pace of applying promising new research findings to clinical treatments. The aim is to improve the success of transplantation and of newer, less invasive treatments for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases, allergies and asthma.
Bluestone will hold the new A.W. & Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor in Metabolism and Endocrinology at UCSF and has also been appointed director of UCSF's Hormone Research Institute and the Metabolic Research Unit.
"Jeff Bluestone is a spectacular addition to an already formidable immunology program, " said Haile T. Debas, MD, dean of the School of Medicine at UCSF. "We expect our diabetes program, in both basic research and patient therapies, to become a national leader."
Bluestone comes to UCSF from the University of Chicago, where he spearheaded the formation of an international network of more than 70 leading researchers in nine countries, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to coordinate clinical testing of new therapies to induce immune tolerance.
Among the eight clinical trials initiated during the first year by this Immune Tolerance Network (ITN), a clinical trial is under way to replicate the promising recent success of islet transplantation for Type 1 diabetics recently reported by researchers in Edmonton, Canada.
The network, which has received more than $140 million in support to date, will be based at UCSF.
In his own research, Bluestone has helped define the critical importance of dual-signaling in the immune system -- known as the T cell receptor and co-stimulatory signaling systems -- which are required to fully launch immune rejection of organ grafts and autoimmune diseases. He has carried out animal studies of islet transplantation using drugs that target one or the other of the signaling mechanisms. The research indicates that a combination of drugs could allow for successful islet transplantation without shutting down the entire immune system.
About one million people in the U.S. have Type 1, insulin-dependent diabetes (formerly known as juvenile-onset diabetes), a condition in which they are unable to produce insulin, usually because their immune system destroys the insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells. Current treatment relies on daily administration of insulin to regulate the body's sugar levels. However, insulin treatment is still inexact, and the inability to effectively control high sugar levels can lead to devastating long-term complications.
A major goal in treatment of Type 1 diabetes has been to replace the insulin producing islet cells. Historically, this has been done by full-organ transplantation of a pancreas, requiring major surgery and the use of toxic drugs to prevent graft rejection. Many researchers now hope that the use of far less invasive islet cell transplantation, combined with the novel drugs to induce tolerance, will lead to long-term independence from insulin treatments for people with the disease.
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