Inflammation versus regulation: how interferon-gamma contributes to type 1 diabetes pathogenesis.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease with onset from early childhood. The insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells are destroyed by CD8 cytotoxic T cells. The disease is challenging to study mechanistically in humans because it is not possible to biopsy the pancreatic islets and the disease is most active prior to the time of clinical diagnosis.