Halting Diabetes Destruction

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body’s immune system attacks its own pancreatic islet cells – specifically the beta cells, which produce insulin. The pancreatic islets of mice with a version of type 1 diabetes are shown above. On the left, the animal’s T cells can be seen crowding into the islet to destroy the beta cells, while on the right far fewer T cells are present. That’s because the animal on the right had been receiving daily injections of a recently discovered mitochondrial protein called MOTS-c, which possesses T cell regulatory activity. Animals treated with MOTS-c had preserved insulin production and improved blood glucose levels compared with controls. They also had significantly delayed onset of diabetes or no diabetes at all. The discovery that patients with type 1 diabetes have unusually low levels of MOTS-c suggests novel treatments aimed at boosting the protein’s activity may be of clinical benefit.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Byung Soo Kong and colleagues
• Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea and Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Cell Reports, July 2021