That JDCA article is really eye opening. Only 14 out of 518 trials are studies for a practical cure. One on there is for vitamin D and omega 3’s in high doses, good luck with that. 127 for disease management, 121 for Glycemic control… we’re getting hoodwinked. The JDRF has the cajones to gives at best 13% to a cure and use “Research” in their name… The ADA is just immoral, they feed off our suffering, they give about 0. Then we have our last remaining hope the governments NIH and they spend $150M a year, and they’re not funding even one active practical cure trial. The NIH likely bought up by the lobby of drug companies to plow that $150M into aimless endeavors like “disease management.” I think the real issue is the incentives are not setup correctly. I bet if the gov’t said insulin prices were set to $10 dollars for a month supply until a glucose-responsive insulin passed the FDA, i bet in a year we would have glucose-responsive insulin hit the market. The only reason we saw FIASP hit the market in the last couple of years is because their patent for novolog expired. These guys are not our friends.
A cure (or vaccine) for type 1 is not going to come through the JDRF or ADA. It’s going to come from a small biotech with venture-backed funding or industry (big pharma) funding. There is $$$ to be made in finding a cure (it would be interesting to look at funding/spending by all of the small companies doing diabetes research now – even those investing in clinical trials – I’ll bet it’s quite a lot of money each year; way more than JDRF or ADA levels). I gave up donating to organizations searching to “cure” anything long ago. Our donations to “research” are meaningless (probably why JDRF and ADA focus mainly on outreach and awareness now). These days my family directs our charitable dollars to organizations that are able to able to address hunger, homelessness, etc. in our community and beyond. Those are the donations that are able to truly help people in need.
A cure for diabetes may well be found once a cure for a single other autoimmune disease has been found. But no autoimmune disease has been cured yet. Which doesn’t let JDRF or ADA or CDA or anyone else off the hook, but apparently it’s not as easy as just pumping money into research. There’s a lot of money collectively going into research, for MS, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, lupus, IBD, Addison’s, on and on and on. Once the key is found, the ripples may spread fast and wide. Or that’s my hope.
Once one realizes that the cause of an auto immune disease is the immune system, which by its very nature is complicated, ones hope for an outright cure diminish proportionately to the tools that the researchers are using to study the problem. While a cure could be just around the corner, the very complexity of the system being studied leads me to believe that we are probably far away from a cure. My biggest hope is for a long lasting implant that gives diabetics a normal A1c without external effort. Then, no matter how long a cure takes, the time will be more than bearable.