The Juvenile Diabetes Research
Foundation (JDRF), the world's leading charitable supporter of research
into type 1 diabetes and its complications, today announced a new,
5-year $15 million joint funding program with the NIH-supported Immune
Tolerance Network (ITN) that is aimed at accelerating the pace of
clinical research towards a cure for type 1 diabetes. The
JDRF-ITN Partnership in Immune Tolerance program will fund early-stage
clinical trials and late stage preclinical development of potential
immune tolerance-inducing treatments for type 1 diabetes.
Applications for support will be accepted on an ongoing basis through
the ITN website beginning today.
"We are thrilled to enter into this new partnership with the ITN, which
further solidifies our relationship with such an outstanding consortium
of researchers," said Dr. Richard Insel, Executive Vice President of
Research for JDRF. "Immune tolerance therapies are among the most
promising in the search for a cure for type 1 diabetes and other
autoimmune diseases, and the ITN is clearly a leader in this exciting
area."
In particular, the new JDRF-ITN Partnership in Immune Tolerance program
aims to bridge early clinical efforts by supporting pre-clinical drug
development, phase 1 safety trials and small efficacy trials that will
provide proof-of-principle in well controlled, safe settings. The
program is targeted at both academic and industry investigators, with
the goal of fostering new partnerships between the two, and has been
set up to respond rapidly to investigators with new innovations.
According to Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone, Director of the Immune Tolerance
Network, "There are no application deadlines for the program and the
application is streamlined for efficiency. The goal here is to
move truly promising strategies forward quickly."
Immune tolerance therapies are a broad class of experimental drugs that
attempt to reprogram the immune system so that it ignores the presence
of certain, specific cells or tissues. Such therapies may halt
the autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells that cause type 1
diabetes and may permit more effective islet replacement therapies by
preventing transplant rejection in a safer, more effective manner.
JDRF has rapidly become one of the leading supporters of tolerance
research. In fact, the results of two JDRF-funded clinical trials
have recently highlighted the excitement over this emerging class of
drugs. In the studies, investigators from the United States and
France showed that custom-designed antibody therapies targeting an
immune system molecule known as CD3 could temporarily halt the
progression of type 1 diabetes in newly diagnosed patients.
Building on the success of these two trials, the ITN is performing a
number of multi-center clinical trials to induce tolerance in patients
with type 1 diabetes. The JDRF-ITN Partnership in Type 1 Diabetes
program will support the investigation of such therapies in the early
stages of their development.
"The early stages of clinical drug development are the most challenging
and are therefore often difficult to fund," explained Dr.
Bluestone. "With JDRF's generous support, this program will help
see that the barriers to the early development of these potentially
life-giving therapies are removed."
