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It’s a Nobel-Prize Level Discovery

It’s a Nobel-Prize Level Discovery

October 25, 2013

Medical Research

Dr. Eli Lewis

Dr. Eli Lewis

Don’t call it a cure, but children and adults with type 1 diabetes may soon get a peaceful night’s sleep and live injection-free lives.

A new combination of safe and well-tested drugs already in use for other conditions has been shown to reverse the disease or lessen the dependence on insulin for many people.

The results of three clinical trials by Dr. Eli Lewis and his team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have Lewis sounding cautious and understandably reluctant to declare it a “cure,” but his research showed that many subjects who were treated within three or four months of diagnosis no longer needed insulin.

The research team also found that patients with a longer history of diabetes 1 were often able to get off of their nighttime insulin.

The research has been so successful that many doctors in the U.S. and Israel are using the drug on an off-label basis in their practices.

“What we found in these three trials is the sooner [the treatment is given] the better,” Lewis told JTNews while speaking at Stanford University and the Diabetes Technology Society in the Eastern U.S.

“Some kids were four years old, and we also had a 30-year-old. The response was very positive, regardless of the age group, as long as it was really early after the diagnosis that the treatment was started. It’s hard to reverse the disease after one or two years.”

However, Lewis said, even the later-diagnosed subjects found some relief from the treatment.

“There was always a slight improvement,” he said. “Even the ones where there was no major change in their glucose levels ended up reaching the nighttime without insulin. If you ask any parent, that is exactly the stressful area.”

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone that transports glucose or sugar into cells to produce energy. Nearly 26 million adults and children have type 1 diabetes in the U.S, and over 200,000 of them are under 20 years old.

“Until now, medicine didn’t have anything to offer kids, but this is revolutionary,” Dr. Andy David, Israel’s consul general to the Pacific Northwest, told JTNews from his office in San Francisco.

Two of David’s three young children have type 1 diabetes. David’s oldest child, a boy, was the first to be diagnosed at the age of five. When his second child, a girl, was diagnosed he began to look for research that might be promising. That’s when he found Lewis’s work.

Today, his thriving eight-year-old girl has been completely off insulin injections for three-and-a-half years after receiving Lewis’s drug therapy.

“It’s a Nobel Prize-level discovery,” David said.

Read more in the JT News, the voice of Jewish Washington >>