I just wrote about mice and my pal Mike remedied me that there are stories about dogs and gene therapy in the news.
So that it is a different model than than mice.
I have joked that you can spit on a NOD mouse and cure it. Still I welcome studies in animals to help find cures. If / when science get there, there may well be a variety of things that are cure-like. I expect better treatments will come first but I digress.
So a quick read of reports on the dog study finds interesting things, promoting insulin production and insulin regulation. Both of which lost in T1D with distraction of beta cells. Both are way cool and I hope lead to more discoveries and progress.
I would caution, as the reports do, that there is the issues that the dogs don't have an autoimmune process attacking the beta cells. In this case the beta cells were killed chemically. So it maybe the gene thing is part of the process. Stopping the auto immune process seems the big part too.
It maybe that the ability to reproduce beta cells is there in full onset but the autoimmune process overwhelms it. Consider for example Joslin has 50 year T1D Medalists who still have some beta cell function. That sure suggests that beta cell can rejuvenate even in long term full onset T1D. (Looking for the citation and I think it was mentioned on 'Rents Blog Talk Radio with John Brooks III.) So the a key then is also stopping the auto immune process that kills them.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/gene-therapy-cures-diabetic-dogs
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23163-gene-therapy-cures-diabetic-dogs.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news
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