Getting kids with Type 1 diabetes off injections: World-first BANDIT trial offers families new hope

An Australian trial using an arthritis drug could see children with Type 1 diabetes able to stop regularly injecting insulin.

A world-first clinical trial now happening in Adelaide and Melbourne aims to free children with Type 1 diabetes of having to regularly inject insulin.

It involves using a drug now safely used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions.

Adelaide University paediatrics professor Jennifer Couper said, if successful, taking a daily Baricitinib tablet could help patients newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes to continue to produce insulin for longer and improve their body’s control of blood glucose levels.

“If we can give a safe medication at the very beginning that can ‘turn off’, or at least slow down, the attack on the insulin producing cells, it will be much easier,” Prof Couper said.

“The way in which we deliver and monitor insulin levels has greatly improved but it is still very intensive and the day-to-day burden can be quite enormous, not only on the children and teenagers themselves but also their families.

“This is the first Australian-grown and -initiated study to help people with new diagnosed Type 1 diabetes … it is the holy grail, if you like – we have long understood how someone gets Type 1 diabetes but trying to turn off that process safely has been difficult.

“(This medication) gently interferes with some of the signals that stimulate the immune system and sort of quietens it in relation to the insulin-making cells.

“It has been used in arthritis and other rarer conditions in very young children for well over 10 years.”

Adelaide University paediatrics professor Jennifer Couper says the trial is significant. Picture SA Health

Each year in South Australia about 120 children are diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin needed to produce energy. Currently there is no cure.

Adelaide teenager Julia Britto-Monteiro, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in November last year, has signed up for the BANDIT trial being run out of Adelaide’s Women and Children’s Hospital in SA, in the hope it will help other young people.

The 16-year-old is required to take four insulin injections daily, before each main meal as well as one additional shot and must carefully monitor her intake of carbohydrates.

“The most challenging thing is to constantly have to think about it, it is just really demanding and it is forever … it would be great and so much easier not to have it constantly at the back of your head,” she said.

Led by Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research the trial is targeted at people aged 12 to 30 years old who have been diagnosed in the past 100 days.

For more information go to www.svi.edu.au/bandit or email Prof Couper at [e-mail]