New Information on Link between 'Killer Cells' and Diabetes

Professor Andy Sewell, an expert in human T-cells from Cardiff University's School of Medicine worked with diabetes experts from King's College London to better understand the role of T-cells in the development of Type 1 diabetes.

The team isolated a T-cell from a patient with Type 1 diabetes to view a unique molecular interaction which results in the killing of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

Type 1 diabetes is a result of the body's own immune system attacking and destroying the cells in the pancreas that manufacture the hormone insulin. Insulin controls blood sugar levels and a lack of insulin is fatal if untreated.

According to Professor Sewell, "The mechanism by which the body attacks its own insulin producing cells in the pancreas is not fully understood. Our findings show how killer T-cells might play an important role in autoimmune diseases like diabetes and we've secured the first ever glimpse of the mechanism by which killer T-cells can attack our own body cells to cause disease."

Co-author of the study, Professor Mark Peakman from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at King's College London and Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust said: "This first sight of how killer T-cells make contact with the cells that make insulin is very enlightening, and increases our understanding of how Type 1 diabetes may arise.

"This knowledge will be used in the future to help us predict who might get the disease and also to develop new approaches to prevent it. Our aim is to catch the disease early before too many insulin-producing cells have been damaged."

The team now hopes that by gaining a better understanding of this process it will put them in a much stronger position to devise new ways to prevent or even halt the disease.

The published study shows that the killer T-cell receptor utilizes an abnormal mode of binding in order to recognize cells producing insulin. This unusual binding is thought to allow the T-cell to survive the culling process designed to rid the body of autoreactive T-cells.

The structure of the killer T-cell receptor bound to the insulin peptide shows that the interaction is highly focused on just a small part of the molecule.

In a further study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry the same Cardiff and King's team has shown that this focused binding mode allows this T-cell receptor to respond to over 1.3 million other peptides of different molecular shape.

This ability to bind peptides with a multitude of different shapes may provide a clue as to how autoimmune diseases are initiated. It is possible that this T-cell was raised to fight an infection via one of the other 1.3 million peptides it can recognize but then inadvertently also recognized insulin once it had been put on 'red alert' by this infection.
Nature Immunology, Jan. 2012