Enzyme Deficiency May Cause Diabetes In Newborns

Filed in archive Research on December 9, 2006

Always searching for a cause, researchers are now looking at an enzyme deficiency in the development of Type 1 diabetes.

The cause of insulin-dependent, permanent diabetes in newborn babies may be a deficiency in the enzyme Pancreatic Endoplasmic Reticulum Kinase (PERK) during a critical period of development before birth, according to a new hypothesis put forward by a team of researchers from Penn State.

In this most severe type of diabetes, individuals are unable to regulate glucose normally because they have few insulin-producing beta cells in their pancreas and the remaining cells do not produce enough insulin. Using special strains of mice bred to be PERK-deficient, the researchers demonstrated that the lack of this enzyme blocked the proliferation of beta cells, hampered the normal functioning of beta cells and also kept beta cells from clustering into islets.

"What happens during fetal development predisposes people either to be able to maintain glucose levels normally or to have diabetes," said team leader Douglas Cavener, professor and head of the Department of Biology. The research results will be published in the journal Cell Metabolism on Dec. 6.