Should we stop trying to improve knowledge and treatments of all human ills in the (possibly mistaken) belief that a cure exists for everything and can be found if only we direct all resources to that end, and let everyone currently affected limp along on what we know up to now?
The issue is that any treatment regime is going to be greatly inferior to a proper cure. I'm actually all in favour of 'limping along'. The reason a cure is always theorised to be far away is because the balance of research is heavily in favour of treatments, rather than cures. On the face of it, Diabetes UK isn't even funding cure research. So that means by following their research model, we'll never develop a cure for diabetes. It's a very simple equation - if you divert the vast majority of research to a cure, maybe it'll come in 10 years. Maybe 100. But either way, it will come quicker than not funding it at all. That's what matters.
My personal view is that given we already have a range of tools at our disposal that largely allow us to eat what we want, when we want, and do what we want, we're in a time of severely diminishing returns from finding new and exciting tablets to take every day.
But the main thing on the very first page is the bit where they have to say why they want to do it and what the benefits will be. They have to quantify these - they can't just say 'I will get the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and anyway it's interesting' or even 'People will feel better and it will save the NHS a bit' They have to say exactly how/why people will feel better and how much ???? will actually be saved. If the realistically predicted result won't be - at worst - cost neutral, then you are most unlikely to get funding for it ......
But that's the thing. There are already projects out there that would lead to a cure if properly funded. We already know islet cell transplants seem to actually work. Why isn't Diabetes UK a)funding a project that enables these cells to be grown and transplanted at a greater rate (clear benefit: we know this already works in T1 treatment, so it's a numbers game) and b)funding a project that finds a way to prevent these cells from being destroyed (clear benefit: we know the reasons these transplants fail is because the cells get destroyed). For the second part, there are already various projects using lisofyllene as a targetted immunosuppressant, and even chitin from shrimp as a protective shell around the cells.
We also already know that combining lisofyllene with Exendin-4 (otherwise known as Byetta, a drug already on the market and used for treating T2) reverses diabetes in rodents. Why isn't Diabetes UK funding human trials? Yes, ok, I'm not a researcher and I'm not a scientist but even a cursory google search will find you several different avenues of cure research that still look reasonably solid on the science front but just haven't been tested. I did actually contact Diabetes UK about these. Unfortunately, their policy is they only fund British research (because of course, British diabetes is completely different from anything the Canadians or Australians have
🙄) which means unless a British researcher magically stumbles on a new idea means we're pretty much stuck. Shouldn't Diabetes UK be doing a better advocacy job with UK researchers then? Shouldn't they be waving some big cheque around for a British researcher to work on a cure if they're going to be parochial about it?
What about the millions of people who are stuck with it already, we have to find ways of helping them better, don't we?
But the only way to do that is to cure them! We've already got hundreds of tablets, test strips, insulins and god knows what else. Why do we need another pill to patch over the cracks caused by the fundamental break in the system? Isn't it better to strive for 20 years of ok-ish diabetes care and then an eternity of no diabetes, than 100 years of good diabetes care?
