An estimated 100,000 young people in the UK suffer from juvenile diabetes and the disease is the principle cause of blindness in Britain. Sufferers also are prone to kidney damage, strokes and some may require amputations.
Currently diabetes patients take daily insulin, usually by injection. Insulin is a hormone made in the pancreas that controls the level of sugar in the blood. In juvenile or type 1 diabetes the body's own immune system has mistakenly recognised the body's insulin producing cells as foreign and so destroyed them.
Replacing the lost insulin by injection is relatively crude way to control glucose levels in the blood and patients still suffer from organ damage caused by excess glucose.
Two recent reports detail promising methods of overcoming the problems associated with daily injection of insulin and hopefully may even lead to matching the levels of insulin produced to the body's varying demand for the hormone throughout the day.
