Ake Lernmark

So the TEDDY study has discovered that the appearance of autoantibodies against insulin producing cells, appear during the first years of life, but the disease is not diagnosed until some ten years later So that's the discovery. We now know where to look for the trigger so we have to explain why this auto anti-bodies develop and now we know that we should look during the first years of life.

For the first time it will allow the researchers to look, to study, the mechanisms that trigger this disease because in the past we didn't know when to look. So if you take a newly diagnosed child and you ask the question what happened to that child a month before diagnosis, or one year before diagnosis - we already missed the point and the point is that we have to look for the trigger during the first years of life, not in conjunction with the diagnosis of diabetes - it's too late.

So let's assume, or hypothesize that there is a virus being responsible for triggering these autoantibodies, the goal is then to make a vaccine against that virus and if that would be the discovery then the chances to prevent type-1 diabetes altogether is very high.