A time-line for diabetes research

6th century BCE – The first known diagnosis of diabetes was made in India. Doctors called the condition medhumeha, meaning "sweet urine disease", and tested for it by seeing whether ants were attracted to the sweetness of the urine.

1st century CE – Diabetes was diagnosed by the ancient Greeks. Aretaeus of Cappadocia named the condition διαβήτης (diabētēs), meaning "one that straddles", referring to the copious production of urine. It was later called diabetes mellitus, "copious production of honey urine", again referring to the sweetness of the urine. Unlike the Indian doctors, Greek doctors tested this directly by drinking a urine sample. At the time a diagnosis of diabetes was a death sentence: "life (with diabetes) is short, disgusting and painful" (Aretaeus of Cappadocia).

It is probably that the ancient Egyptians and early Chinese cultures also independently discovered diabetes.

10th century CE - Avicenna of Persia provided the first detailed description of diabetes (diagnosed through "abnormal appetite and the collapse of sexual functions" as well as the "sweet taste of diabetic urine"). He also provided the first (partially) effective treatment, using a mixture of lupine, trigonella and zedoary seed.

1889 – Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski in Germany developed the first animal model of diabetes using dogs, discovering the role of the pancreas.

1921 - Federick Banting and Charles Best in Canada first cured canine diabetes by purification and injection of canine insulin.

1922 - For the first time diabetes stopped being a death sentence. In 1922 Federick Banting and Charles Best treated the first human patient with bovine insulin. Notably they decided to make their patent available globally without charge.

1922-1980 - Treatment of patients with animal insulin or human insulin extracted from cadavers. Substantial life extension but also significant side-effects.

1955 - Determination of the protein sequence of insulin by Federick Sanger in the United Kingdom.

1980 - First commercial production of recombinant human insulin, by Genentech.

Today there is no cure for diabetes, but when treated it only results in an average loss of 10 years (the same as smoking).

The ethics of biobanking

The University of Leuven hosted two lectures on biobanking today, one by Hainaut from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the other by Juhl from the biobanking company Indivumed.

Biobanking is a tricky ethical area, with little consensus and vague law. Who owns the material taken from a patient? The patient? The hospital? The surgeon? If someone wants to use the material, what is the default position? Should the patient have to provide consent or is consent assumed unless the patient opts out? Does the patient even have the right to opt out at a latter time point? Hainaut made the case that there is a moral duty on every person to allow access to their biological samples for the good of humanity. His example was that a excised breast cancer not only belongs to that woman, but also to all other women who may develop breast cancer in the future.

This is an attractive argument but has flaws. If the information generated goes into the public sphere, such that new treatments can be developed and accessed, it may be reasonable to use the moral argument, in the same way that organ donation as the default option can be argued on moral grounds. However, to me this argument is flawed if the information generated does not go into the public sphere. If the information is not published (a secretive researcher or company keeping back information for potential future uses) or if it is published with restrictions on use (ie, patented) that information is not open to all of humanity. Isn't it unethical for a biobank to appeal to the moral duty to all of humanity unless legal restrictions are placed on the biobank to ensure that the proceeds of the bank are available to all of humanity? Doesn't informed consent require donors to be told the status of information generated from their samples?

Unfortunately, Hainaut was not able to answer this question when asked, as Juhl (CEO of a biobanking company that only publishes a fraction of the data it generates) jumped in with a rant about for-profit vs not-for-profit. His contention was that every person acts through the personal profit motive, so that whether the biobank made a profit or not didn't matter. His position is that only private companies have the money to put forward to do the research, and they deserve a profit for the research they do. Perhaps, but irrelevant to the ethical question. If the research outcomes are utilitarian then the utilitarian argument should be put to prospective donors - such as DeCode offering all future drugs free of charge to Icelandic people in exchange for access to the medical records and genome of the Icelandic people. Material can be collected for a utilitarian motive using utilitarian appeals, or for a moral motive using moral appeals. What is unethical is to use a moral appeal to collect material destined for a utilitarian purpose.

Hopefully we will see future legislation reflect the ethical considerations of biobanking in more a more thoughtful manner than was presented today. Donations made by the public for the public good should be legally bound to this use. It is illegal for a charity to accept a monetary donation, keep 90% of the money for personal use and spend 10% on charitable works. Likewise it should be illegal for a biobank that accepts material presented as a public donation to only release 10% of the data produced by the donation, and keep 90% to itself.

Infectious cancer

It has long been known that the several causes of cancer are infectious. Typically a virus contains a number of oncogenes to enhance its own proliferation, and in an infection gone wrong (for both virus and host) a viral oncogene is incorporated into the host DNA, creating an uncontrollable tumour cell. One of the best examples of this is human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus which infects most sexually active adults and is responsible for nearly every case of cervical cancer worldwide (which is why all girls should be vaccinated before they become sexually active).

However these cases are not "infectious cancers", they are infectious diseases which are capable of causing cancer. True infectious cancers, where a cancer cell from one individual takes up residency in a second individual and grows into a new cancer, were unknown until recently. With the publication of a new study in PNAS we now have three examples of truly infectious cancers.

1. In the most recent study, researchers in Japan documented the tragic case of a 28 year old Japanese woman who gave birth to a healthy baby but within two months had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and died. At 11 months of age the child also become ill and was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Genetic analysis of the tumour cells in the baby demonstrated that the tumour cells were not from the child herself, but rather maternal leukemia cells that had crossed the placenta during pregnancy or childbirth and had taken up residency in their new host. With this information, retrospective analysis indicates that this is probably not a one-off event, and at least 17 other cases of mother-to-child transmission of cancer have probably occurred.

2. In addition to mother-to-child transmission of cancer, cancer can spread from one identical twin to another. Identical (mono-zygotic) twins have identical immune systems, preventing rejection of "transplanted" cells, unlike non-identical (di-zygotic) twins. Thus a tumour which develops before birth in one identical twin can be transferred in utero to the other identical twin, where it can grow without being rejected. In one improbable but highly informative case, a set of triplets were born where two babies were identical and the third was non-identical. A tumour had arisen in one of the identical twins in utero and had passed to both other foetuses, but had been rejected by the non-identical foetus and accepted by the identical foetus. Of course, with the advent of medical transplantation, transmission of infectious cancers is now no longer limited to the uterus. Transplantation of an organ containing a cancer into a new host can allow the original cancer to grow and spread, as transplantation patients are immunosuppressed to prevent rejection. There is also a single case of a cancer being transmitted from a surgeon who cut his hand during surgery to a patient who was not immunosuppressed.

3. In a medical mystery well known to Australians, the population of Tasmanian Devils has been crashing as a fatal facial tumour has been spreading across the population. The way the fatal tumours have spread steadily across Tasmania and sparing Devils on smaller islands first suggested a new infectious disease that causes cancer, similar to HPV in humans. However a suprising study demonstrated that the cancer was directly spreading from one Devil to the next after having spontaneously developed in a single individual. These scrappy little monsters attack each other on first sight, biting each other's faces. The cancer resides in the salivary glands and gets transmitted by facial bites to the new Devil. Unfortunately for Tasmanian Devils, a genetic bottleneck left all Devils so genetically similar that they are, for immunological purposes, all identical twins. This means that the cancer cells transmitted from one Devil to another through biting are able to grow and kill Devil after Devil. The cancer from a single individual has already killed 50% of all Devils, and it is possible that we will have to wait until the cancer burns out by killing all potential hosts before reintroducing the Devil from the protected island populations. As unlikely as this seems, another similar spread occurs in dogs, where a cancer that arose in a single individual wolf is being spread through sexual transmission from dog to dog around the world. This example also illustrates the point made about cancers being "immortal" - the original cancer event may have occured up to 2500 years ago, with the tumour moving from host to host for thousands of years without dying out.

When you eat matters

A very interesting study has just been published in the journal Obesity. The work, by Arble and colleagues in the Turek laboratory, fed mice high-fat food either during the day or at night. The surprising result was that mice fed during the day put on 20% more weight than mice fed at night. In both cases the mice had unlimited access to food yet both groups of mice ate the same amount, so there was no difference in net calories. Instead, what this result suggests is that the body deals with calories differently at different points of the diurnal cycle. During the active phase (night for mice) calories are shifted into burn mode, while during the resting phase (daytime for mice) calories are stored with greater efficiency.

If this result can be translated into humans it would suggest that large meals should be concentrated in the active phase of the day, breakfasts and lunches, and that evening or night meals should be restricted. An interesting proposal is that the American evening-biased eating rhythm compared to the European lunch-biased eating rhythm is partly responsible for the obesity problem in America. Of course it could only ever be a fraction of the problem, as many other correlates with obesity are well recognised. For example, a study by Pickett and colleages has demonstrated that countries with higher income inequality have higher calorific intake and obesity, and another study by Bassett and colleagues points out that Belgians burn 62 extra Calories per day by walking and cycling, compared to a poor 20 Calories per day by Americans.

The other important aspect of this study is that it contributes to the growing body of evidence dispelling the simplistic "obesity = too many calories and not enough exercise" formula. As published by the Segal laboratory, the majority of difference in body mass index (BMI) is due to genetics (64%). Being overweight does not mean that an individual is making worse eating or exercising decisions than a healthy range individual - the majority of the difference in weight just comes down to the fact that different genetics leads to different metabolisms.

The Placebo Effect

What is the "placebo effect"? The words are bandied around constantly but tend to be poorly understood. Put simply, the "placebo effect" is the medical response of your body to the idea that you are taking drugs, in the absence of actual drugs. How can this occur? There is nothing mystical about this, the effect of mood on brain chemistry is well documented, and the physiological effects of brain chemistry on our body are surprisingly strong. What is more unusual is a question posed by a recent article in Wired - why does the placebo effect appear to be getting stronger in drug trials?

Is this true? Is the placebo effect actually getting stronger? Actually we have no idea. Drug companies never test the strength of the placebo effect. To actually test the placebo effect you need to have three groups: no treatment, placebo treatment and drug treatment. The "no treatment" group measures the spontaneous remission rate (is, the background of how many people would get better over the treated period of time without treatment). The "placebo treatment" group can then measure any additional effects of the patients thinking they are taking drugs, while the "drug treatment" group measures the biomedical effect of the drug. Since drug companies almost never include a "no treatment" group, the increasing effect in the "placebo treatment" group could either be due to increasing spontaneous remission rates or due to an increasing effect of placebos. Changes in spontaneous remission rate are just as feasible as changes in the placebo effect, as the health of the population is generally increasing over time, and a generally healthy person has a higher spontaneous remission rate.

If we assume, however, that it is the placebo effect that is increasing over time, do we have reasonable explanation for this? The answer is probably a lot more simple than drug companies are making it out to be. Changes in the scale of the placebo effect are regionally localised and concentrated in conditions such as depression, epilepsy and pain. The simplest explanation (and hence, according to Occam's razor, the one we turn to first) is that the patient composition of these groups has been changing over time, especially in certain regions. In particular, we have observed large improvements in medical diagnosis, such that more subtle cases are being detected. We have also experienced a "medicalisation" of non-medical conditions, strong moods or emotions being labelled as medical conditions and lumped together with cases caused by biomedical disruptions (ironically driven largely by drug companies seeking to expand their markets). It would be predicted that less severe cases of medical conditions, and emotional/behavioural conditions misdiagnosed as medical conditions, would be more amenable to the effects of placebos on brain chemistry. A simple test for this hypothesis exists - take an existing drug and recruit a patient cohort using identical criteria as the original drug trial. If the "altered patient cohort" hypothesis is correct a new drug trial using past inclusion criteria should show the same level of placebo effect as the original trial.

Of course the real issue for the drug companies is that the drugs being developed and tested are less and less efficacious. The placebo effect is only an issue when drugs have borderline effects. If a drug company invented a new quinine or penicillin there would be no concerns about skating around the edges of statistical significance.