More groundbreaking research funded by the NIH. It's sad to think about how much the US is going to lose with the arbitrary slashing and burning and purging.
Most research that is pointed towards important things does get funding from NIH. Most research fails. NIH has a bucket of money for every major issue facing the population. Just takes a few PhD's and a hypothesis to write a proposal.
So long as the research has a conclusion, it's not a failure. We learned something. There may be something to be said for whether or not the research is a worthy topic, but that's a different conversation.
The American consumer gets a treatment that didn't exist yesterday and whose IP will be free in ~15 years for their tax dollars. A pretty reasonable give and take on the face of it.
(Not that polices to reduce the cost to Americans, especially relative to foreign markets, ought to be unpopular)
The important thing is that these things get funded. It doesn't matter what institute funds them. If an institute becomes stultified and corrupt, there's no reason to champion it over creating another.
That's true, but I have lots of experience with the NIH, and haven't found it stultified nor corrupted. In fact, did you hear they recently funded a project that reversed type 1 diabetes?
Besides what others have said, the government is immune from many of the multi-agent coordination problems that trap other types of entities. It's basically the essential reason we have government at all.
So no, not all things government does can be replaced by the private sector, for reasons of game theory.
Slashing is not permanent. It is important to slash in order to determine a middle ground. If a company fires 100 employees and certain operations stop functioning, they may hire back 10 employees and reassess. If operations are still not functional enough, they will hire 10 more. This process continues until everything is operational again. The result is a company that functions just as effectively as before but with fewer employees. This is an optimization of resources and efficiency.
>It is important to slash in order to determine a middle ground
That's not true.
> If a company fires 100 employees and certain operations stop functioning, they may hire back 10 employees and reassess
How likely is it that 10 employees come back? How likely is it that critical institutional knowledge is lost forever?
> The result is a company that functions just as effectively as before but with fewer employees
Does it? Have you ever been through a reorg or restructuring at work? Do things ever get back to just as effective as before any time soon?
> This is an optimization of resources and efficiency
It's squandering human capitol, knowledge and reduced efficiency both in the short term and long term. It's the most expensive way to reduce your overhead. A far cry from optimization.
How the heck do you apply this process to fundamental research? It's pretty much always the case that with basic research you could have cut 95% of studies after the fact and it wouldn't have made much difference in the end.
The problem is you don't know which 95% of studies beforehand.
> To prevent islet rejection, immune-suppressing drugs are given over the long term.
This makes it a non starter. Immunosuppressants are generally considered a worse quality of life than insulin treatment. That's why pancreas transplants are generally only done for type 1 diabetics if they are already on immunosuppressants.
I'm hopeful that someday we'll have a good system for "caging" cells to prevent an immune response (in either direction) while also permitting the visitors to sustain themselves with blood nutrients and regulate hormones or clean waste.
Sort of like the role of the blood-brain barrier, or maybe a placenta.
Yes! I think there was some work being done with a islet transplant like that. I'm not sure of the details though - it's probably a long way off, if it works.
As a T1D: can confirm. Taking insulin is a hassle, but definitely not "I'd rather take immunosuppressants". I'm having a hard time even contextualizing how much worse that is.
Yep. The hard, if not kear impossible part will be just resetting the one part of the immune system attacking the islets without turning off or resetting the immune system.
The promising part here is that someday it will be possible to take stem cells from a patient and specialize them to islet cells. Similar to what they’re doing here with vascular cells. It’s far too expensive at the moment, but ultimately the process will be improved and refined, and the costs will come down. At least that’s my hope for a cure.
Easiest method may be to nuke the immune system and put a new one in place. As the immune system consists of several parts it may be sufficient to just replace one of them.
This makes the vascular implants produced by Humacyte more interesting. They’re made of cells which aren’t recognized by the immune system. Humacyte is in the beginning stages of seeing if they can fit beta cells into the produced vascular implants, while remaining undetected by the immune system.
Yes, immunity is the big problem. You probably need to replenish the islets either way. Also, I don't think doctors would be content giving someone that isn't suppressed this without loads of research.
So it's a trade-off between increased risk of cancer[0] and the consequences of type 1 diabetes? Doesn't sound like a fun trade-off but I don't know anything.
Type 1 diabetic here: you're right, it's a bad tradeoff. We already can do pancreas transplants for T1D, but the reason it's very uncommon is that immunosuppressants are a very bad tradeoff. Insulin treatment is preferred in the vast majority of cases.
Stuff like this will never be a breakthrough until it doesn't need immunosuppressants. The best advancements in diabetes treatment will most likely continue to be on closed loop artificial pancreas systems.
Insulin-specific immunotherapies are currently under development. We will soon be able to restore tolerance to insulin, and other pancreatic antigens such as GAD-65, without the need for broad immunosupressants. Ideally, this should stop β cell destruction and conversion to T1D from auto-antibody positive status, as well as facilitate islet transplants with minimal side effects for those that are already T1D patients.
I wouldn't call closed loop systems much of an advancement... Sure, it doses insulin automatically based off of CGM data, but it's barely any better than just injecting yourself. Cons even outweight the pros for some - being constantly attached to a device is no fun. And the slugishness of exogenous insulin (both: the way it is injected and its time of action) diminishes any attempts to achieve precision using CGM data and algorithms in controlling diabetes. Not to mention CGM data isn't that accurate/rapid enough also. All in all, it's just not efficient, calling these systems 'artificial pancreas' is more of a marketing gimmick than reality, thus why a proper cure is needed.
If you take rapamycin or a rapalog as an anti-rejection drug, your risk of cancer is lower - not higher - because it's not actually an immune suppressant so much as a drug that prevents hyperimmunity. [1] Other immune suppressants work differently but it's not a blanket true statement that taking anti-rejection drugs will increase your risk of cancer. Depends what you take.
You can read the section in [1] titled "Cancer prevention in humans."
> Starting from 2004, numerous studies demonstrated that rapamycin and everolimus reduced the incidence of various cancers in organ transplant patients.
[edit] In fact in addition to its use as an anti-rejection medication, rapamycin is used as chemotherapy to treat certain forms of cancer.
I don't think that's how Type I Diabetes works. People get Type I Diabetes because their immune system attacked their own insulin producing cells in the first place. It's an autoimmune disease. So if you replenish those cells, they'll just get attacked again.
The author claimed no competing interests, yet his research is used for the patents. We'll see how it plays out in the real world after all the stardust settles.
Awesome. Hopefully when this is perfected they'll be enough pancreases to cure everyone. My pancreas is ear marked for my sibling should I become an eligible donor.
Readit News
So long as the research has a conclusion, it's not a failure. We learned something. There may be something to be said for whether or not the research is a worthy topic, but that's a different conversation.
There is going to be AT LEAST a whole generation of loss of progress at this point.
Everything is going to slowly crawl to a stop
and it's not an accident but by design, it's right out of Project2025
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ban-renewing-sen...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-...
Deleted Comment
(Not that polices to reduce the cost to Americans, especially relative to foreign markets, ought to be unpopular)
Dead Comment
Are you implying the NIH is "stultified and corrupt"?
If so, care to back that claim up?
So no, not all things government does can be replaced by the private sector, for reasons of game theory.
Trying to fix the world with a sledgehammer.
That's not true.
> If a company fires 100 employees and certain operations stop functioning, they may hire back 10 employees and reassess
How likely is it that 10 employees come back? How likely is it that critical institutional knowledge is lost forever?
> The result is a company that functions just as effectively as before but with fewer employees
Does it? Have you ever been through a reorg or restructuring at work? Do things ever get back to just as effective as before any time soon?
> This is an optimization of resources and efficiency
It's squandering human capitol, knowledge and reduced efficiency both in the short term and long term. It's the most expensive way to reduce your overhead. A far cry from optimization.
The problem is you don't know which 95% of studies beforehand.
The argument that 'slashing' is the only way to reduce headcount is also extremely dumb.
This makes it a non starter. Immunosuppressants are generally considered a worse quality of life than insulin treatment. That's why pancreas transplants are generally only done for type 1 diabetics if they are already on immunosuppressants.
Two examples off the top of my head: Sana recently announced islet cell transplantation without immunosuppression (press release: https://ir.sana.com/news-releases/news-release-details/sana-... ) and Vertex (ongoing trial: https://www.breakthrought1d.org/news-and-updates/vertex-laun... ).
Sort of like the role of the blood-brain barrier, or maybe a placenta.
Dead Comment
https://stemcellres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1328...
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/i...
Stuff like this will never be a breakthrough until it doesn't need immunosuppressants. The best advancements in diabetes treatment will most likely continue to be on closed loop artificial pancreas systems.
You can read the section in [1] titled "Cancer prevention in humans."
> Starting from 2004, numerous studies demonstrated that rapamycin and everolimus reduced the incidence of various cancers in organ transplant patients.
[edit] In fact in addition to its use as an anti-rejection medication, rapamycin is used as chemotherapy to treat certain forms of cancer.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10103596/
My point is cancer is worse than DI. At least you can manage DI
https://stemcellres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1328...
That would mitigate the cancer risk, since immunosuppression would not be required?
> immunosuppression would not be required
I don't think that's how Type I Diabetes works. People get Type I Diabetes because their immune system attacked their own insulin producing cells in the first place. It's an autoimmune disease. So if you replenish those cells, they'll just get attacked again.