Wow! If the article is accurate then all sorts of T1 solutions will happen very quickly…
So, noteworthy, what they’ve done here is essentially engineered insulin mutants that bind closely to T cells (aka create an immune response). They’ve presented a idea of how the body could theoretically create their engineered mutants. They have not isolated their engineered mutants from any animal or model system, they’ve just synthesised them and tested their binding activity to the T cells. Directly from the journal article’s discussion section: “A limitation to our hypothesis is that we have not yet identified the presence of these proinsulin chimeric peptides in vivo in the pancreas, a formidable task on which we continue to work.”
I find the news article associated with this a little misleading, at best they have a strong guess at what is triggering type 1 diabetes, but little to no evidence that this is actually happening in an in vivo system. It’s definitely an interesting study though, and I’ll be very glad if they make further breakthroughs with it.