Immune preventive approaches for type-1-diabetes.

Type-1-diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases of childhood. Children with type-1-diabetes need life-long insulin treatment, with enormous consequences for the child and its family. Years to months before clinical symptoms of type-1-diabetes onset appear, subclinical destruction of the insulin producing beta cells takes place. This process is identified by circulating islet autoantibodies to beta cell antigens, and is mediated by a lack of immunological tolerance [20]. Several immune preventive approaches could already show that administration of the antigen insulin delays type-1-diabetes onset by involving the induction of insulin-specific regulatory T cells [5, 7] . Antigen-specific therapy with insulin before or immediately after the development of autoantibodies may induce the protective immune response that prevents the emergence of autoimmunity and type-1-diabetes