A cure for insulin-dependent diabetes may be in sight after United States scientists not only halted the disease in mice, but reversed it.
Planned patient trials could lead to a cure for the disorder, scientists say.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said they had reversed the disease in mice by injecting them with spleen cells from healthy animals.
The work was a follow up to research in 2001 in which spleen cells called splenocytes were shown to halt the auto-immune process behind type 1 diabetes.
At that time, the scientists were surprised to find that treated animals did not need a subsequent pancreatic transplant. Their bodies appeared to be secreting insulin anyway.
The unanswered question was whether a few remaining islet cells had been rescued in the diabetic mice, or whether new cells were actually being generated.
The new results, published in the journal Science, confirmed that the pancreas was being reconstructed in the sick mice.
That finding means for the first time there is a prospect of curing patients with type-1 diabetes.
The director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Centre, Dr David Nathan, said: "These exciting findings in a mouse model of type-1 diabetes suggest that patients who are developing this disease could be rescued from further destruction of their insulin-producing cells . . . (and) patients with fully established diabetes possibly could have their diabetes reversed."
Insulin dependent or type-1 diabetes results in the immune system attacking the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin, the essential hormone that allows the body to obtain energy from glucose.
Sufferers have to give themselves regular insulin injections to balance their blood sugar and ensure what they eat is turned into body fuel.
The illness affects 194 million people worldwide.