You might have seen this recently headline from Reuters:
Andromeda says Teva to market diabetes treatment
This headline is quite misleading. What has actually happened is this: "Teva had decided to exercise its option to complete a $13.5 million investment to market Andromeda's treatment for Type I diabetes." This is an announcement about money, not about the availability of a treatment for type-1 diabetes.
Andromeda's treatment, called DiaPep 277 is a a "heat shock protein". This is a protein that is generated naturally by the body when stressed, and is known to help modulate immune response. The following article:
http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/results.php?storyarticle=793
contains a good overview of heat shock proteins, and how DiaPep 277 is supposed to work. But remember that the clinical trial discussed there are 7 years old at this point.
It is in the middle of a 5 year phase-III human trial, starting in June 2005 and ending in June 2011. I believe it was the earliest possible type-1 cure to go into phase-III human trials (the last phase before marketing approval). The early results were not very promising, but they added more people to the trial, and changed the way they analyzed the data, and are hoping for good results. So far, I have not seen any good news type results from this study, but Andromeda seems very positive, and Teva has put in over US$ 15 million over the last year, so they think that something is there. I just do not see it myself.
Press coverage:
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssHealthcareNews/idUSLM39121220090622
Clinical Trial record for this study:
http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00615264
More information here:
http://joshualevy.pbworks.com/DiabetesCureReadyForHumanTrials#Diapep277orhsp60byAndromeda
http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.com/search/label/Andromeda
Joshua Levy
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