A drug developed to treat leukaemia has been found to also reverse diabetes in a mouse model of the disease.

A new study by Cédric Louvet and colleagues reveals that imatinib (Gleevec) and another tyrosine kinase-inhibiting drug prevented or reversed type 1 diabetes in mice by dampening the animals' immune system.

Imatinib was developed to inhibit a specific tyrosine kinase present in chronic myelogenous leukaemia, but the drug also inhibits other tyrosine kinases, several of which exist in the immune system. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder, caused when inflammation destroys cells in the pancreas.

To test if imatinib would ameliorate this inflammation and thus prevent onset of the diabetes, the researchers tested the drug in a mouse model of the disease. In doing so, they found that treating mice with imatinib or a similar inhibitor drug for seven weeks before the onset of autoimmune (type 1) diabetes prevented development of the disease long after the treatment was stopped.

The drug also put 80 percent of mice with existing disease into remission when mice were treated for 8-10 weeks after disease onset. The efficacy suggests that the same drugs that had important ramifications for cancer treatment could be used to treat type 1 diabetes and, possibly, other autoimmune diseases, according to the authors.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Article: 08-10246 "Tyrosine kinase inhibitors reverse type 1 diabetes in NOD mice," by Cédric Louvet, Gregory L. Szot, Jiena Lang, Michael R. Lee, Nicolas Martinier, Gideon Bollag, Shirley Zhu, Arthur Weiss, and Jeffrey A. Bluestone