FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 11, 2004

contact: Rich Murphy, PNRI (206) 726-1200 rmurphy@pnri.org

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) in Seattle announced today that they are embarking on the largest and most ambitious research study ever undertaken to learn about the environmental causes of type 1 diabetes. The program will span almost two decades and involve the experiences of hundreds of thousands of families and children here in the Northwest and at five other clinical sites in the US and Europe.

Dr. Bill Hagopian, principal scientist at PNRI and lead investigator of the Seattle research, will be working in tandem with scientists in Colorado and Georgia, as well as in Germany, Finland, and Sweden. He and his PNRI colleagues plan to screen 44,000 participants over the next four years, and then follow 1,200 of those children and their families for up to fifteen years. At each of the other clinical study sites, large numbers of additional children and families will also participate in the research.

The $35 million study is being funded by the National Institute of Digestive and Diabetes and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), a division of the National Institutes of Health. Seattle, like each of the other study sites, will receive about $1 million per year to cover base operating costs of the research.

Nothing like this--on this scale, with this complexity--has ever been done before. "Millions of dollars have been spent on the genetics of type 1 diabetes," Hagopian says. "But family studies clearly show that environmental factors are equally important in causing the disease. And it is only now that we will be able to look at those factors in great detail."

Infants who have been identified as possessing one or another of the genes that put them at high risk for developing diabetes will be followed from the time they are newborns until they are fifteen. Blood samples will be drawn regularly. Stool samples and toenail samples will also be collected and banked. Tap water from the family home will be collected and saved. Families will also provide detailed records of the child's environment--the history of the child's vaccinations, a detailed record of family dynamics, the presence of pets, instances of possible exposure of the child to pesticides, and the introduction of the child to certain foods, like infant formula, cow's milk, or wheat products. When some of the children in the study actually develop childhood diabetes, Hagopian and his colleagues will have a considerable body of data from which to discern the environmental factors involved in triggering the disease.

The results will be years in coming. But Hagopian believes that the TEDDY study (The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young) will provide us with critical new insight into the way type 1 diabetes develops. It will help us better predict the disease, prevent or delay its onset, and introduce more effective measures to cure it.

The potential public health benefits are enormous. Given the huge current cost of diabetes--according to some estimates as much as $132 billion each year--Hagopian says the TEDDY study will enable us to make a real and tangible difference. "If you just look at avoidance," he says, "as compared to treatment, you can see how the benefits stack up. Once we know what some of the triggers are, we may be able to easily avoid them. Avoidance may have fewer side effects than complicated immunotherapies. And it will certainly cost far less."