Kyle C. A. Wedgwood,

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body's natural defences, which usually protect us from germs and bacteria, attack the insulin secreting cells in the pancreas. Insulin is one of the key hormones that regulates blood sugar levels and the cells that secrete it are known as beta-cells. When too many of the insulin secreting cells die, the pancreas can no longer sufficiently regulate blood sugar levels and patients become dependent on externally provided insulin - without it, they will die. The beta-cells do not regrow and so once they are gone, they are gone for good.

We don't yet know why this happens or even whether is an issue with the immune system or with the beta-cells themselves.

There are many different kinds of immune cells, but only some of which have been shown to be important in type 1 diabetes. The main ones are the T-cells, which find and kill the beta cells, B-cells, which activate T-cells, making them better at killing, and macrophages, which remove dead cells from the body.

Unlike type 2 diabetes, which is typically associated with obesity, type 1 diabetes has a strong genetic component, meaning that some people are naturally more likely to get it than others. Type 1 diabetes usually starts at a young age, though there are increasingly more people being diagnosed later in life. This is partly due to the lack of a good test to distinguish between the two types of diabetes.

At the moment, there is no cure for type 1 diabetes. Treatment relies upon the monitoring of blood sugar levels and administration of manufactured insulin. There have been significant technological advances in both of these areas, resulting in signinficant improvements in quality of life and life expectancy for people with the disease. Experimental procedures transplanting intact donated pancreatic tissue into patients are also being investigated. In spite of this, the root causes of the disease remain unknown.

The main reason we haven't found a cure is the lack of human data available. In the world, there are in total only around 200 samples of the relevant pancreatic areas from human patients. We can perform experiments on mice, and this has given us some useful insights, but more recent evidence has shown that the disease in mice behaves very differently to that in humans.

We are attempting to create a virtual environment that mimics the human pancreas and the action of the immune cells. This is based on known physiology of the pancreas, together with our knowledge of how the immune system works. In this environment, we can perform experiments quickly and cheaply without the need for human tissue. Once the environment has been built and tested, we can use it to investigate potential ways to slow or stop the progression of the disease.