About two-and-a-half years ago, Toronto’s Sue Beamish was busy helping her son get ready to leave home for university. Peter was 18 and excited about heading to Kingston. But a few months prior to packing up, he had been experiencing excessive thirst. His mom admits that they were blindsided when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

“The diagnosis came out of the blue,” Beamish said at a recent event at UBC hosted by the JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) Canadian Clinical Trials Network (CCTN). “During this emotional and tumultuous time for our family, we saw very quickly how positive a role technology has played in dealing with the day-to-day life with type 1.…We have access to many excellent monitors, pumps, and insulin that are available today, but having this technology, while great, is not enough. It’s important to have the hope that someday soon there will be a cure.”

Beamish subsequently explained to the Georgia Straight that there’s a steep learning curve that accompanies a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, in which the pancreas fails to produce insulin.

“There is such a lot of work and discipline needed to properly manage diabetes,” Beamish said. “Peter had to learn so much in a very short time. He had to learn to draw blood from his finger to test his blood sugar and remember to do it throughout the day. He had to learn to inject himself with insulin before each meal and before bed each night. He had to figure out how to count the amount of carbohydrates in his food so he could figure out how much insulin to take. As he reached 19, he had to learn how alcohol affects blood sugar and the dangers of drinking too much. He has had to deal with the feelings of anger and depression that result from being diagnosed with a tough disease that will last the rest of his life.”

Beamish was in Vancouver as a representative of the WB Family Foundation, which recently donated $3 million to the JDRF CCTN. With the funding, the CCTN will expand from Eastern Canada to this country’s West, with two new research projects taking place at UBC. The studies focus specifically on finding a cure for the disease that affects more than 300,000 people across the nation.

The CCTN started in 2009 with the launch of nine clinical trials in Ontario. The federal government contributed $20 million to the research, with the JDRF providing another $13.9 million. With the latest funding from the WB Family Foundation, British Columbians will now be able to participate in the clinical trials.

One of the projects relates to transplantation of islets (groups of pancreatic insulin-secreting cells). Timothy Kieffer, a professor in UBC’s department of cellular and physiological sciences, explained at the launch that stem cells can effectively treat diabetes but there are two major problems with this approach. For one, the cells must come from organ donors, and there aren’t nearly enough donors to provide sufficient cells to people with diabetes. Furthermore, to prevent recipients’ own immune cells from attacking the transplanted cells, people have to take antirejection medication for the rest of their lives.

To tackle the first obstacle, Kieffer and other local researchers are looking at ways to cultivate stem cells in a laboratory. “The beauty of this approach is to help everybody with diabetes,” Kieffer said. “Supply isn’t a limitation.”

For the second problem, the team is devising ways to transplant those cells via a small device that would protect them from being rejected by the recipient’s immune system. “The cells would be transplanted within the device under the skin,” Kieffer explained. “Cells will automatically sense changes in blood sugar and release appropriate amounts of insulin at the right time, hopefully, for optimal blood-glucose control.”

The hope is that there would be no need for immunosuppressive medication.

Another branch of research is being led by Rusung Tan, head of the immunity in health and disease research program at Vancouver’s Child & Family Research Institute. Tan and other investigators will look at the role a drug called Stelara could play in treating diabetes. Currently used to treat severe psoriasis, the medication is said to be relatively free of adverse effects.

“It works by inhibiting or partially inhibiting immune cells that attack the skin in psoriasis,” Tan said. “Our hope is that it will also help by inhibiting the T cells that attack [insulin-secreting] beta cells [in diabetes]. The hypothesis is it will halt progression of type 1 diabetes if we start it early enough in [the] course of illness.…We believe if we can start early enough and preserve the beta cells that produce insulin, it will prolong the period in which patients stay off insulin [and] the better it is for glucose control, health, and lifestyle.”

Dave Prowten, president and CEO of JDRF Canada, thanked the WB Family Foundation at the launch and underlined the urgency of the research and finding a cure.

“Diabetes affects the person but it also affects the whole family: parents…and grandparents,” Prowten said. “It has this profound effect, and we want to change that. It’s a problem that needs a solution.…And we’ve got to solve it.”