[EdnBama]

The full article is here.

A snippet:

The research team has been studying antigen-presenting cells, or APCs, which show the body's white blood cells what to fight off and what to leave alone, a process called "tolerance induction."

In type 1 diabetes, the white blood cells go haywire and destroy cells in the pancreas that create insulin.

"The analogy I use is that the tolerance induction process is like a college-level course, but the teachers themselves, in this case the antigen-presenting cells, have not gotten out of the second grade," Serreze said. "We're trying to understand the genetic basis for this developmental defect."

As Serreze and his researchers have worked to unlock the reasons this defect occurs, they have found a way to solve the problem in laboratory mice that have been engineered to develop type 1 diabetes.

Yi-guang Chen, a postdoctoral fellow from China, discovered a corrective protein that fixes the APCs. For the moment, the protein is called "Factor Yi" after the researcher.