Content about Autoimmunity

NEW YORK — Baxter and Momenta have agreed to partner to develop and market biosimilar  drugs to treat cancer, autoimmune disorders and other chronic conditions.

CHICAGO — The first study to report the effects vitamin D has on the immune system of people with lupus was unveiled Saturday at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Scientific Meeting here.

The small sample study determined that vitamin D supplementation helped improve cell level counts associated with the disease.

NEW YORK — Many children with Type 1 diabetes have other autoimmune disorders as well, according to published reports.

Citing findings in a recent study of nearly 500 children published in the journal Diabetes Care, Reuters reported that one-third of children with the disease — an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the cells of the pancreas — also have such disorders as celiac disease, autoimmune thyroid disease and a disorder of the adrenal glands called Addison’s disease.

INDIANAPOLIS — Drug maker Eli Lilly and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will fund research to find ways to regenerate insulin-producing cells in patients with Type 1 diabetes.

The two announced Thursday that ideas included finding ways to grow new insulin-producing cells within a person’s body. Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks beta cells, the cells that allow the body to produce insulin. As many as 3 million people in the United States have Type 1 diabetes.

BASEL, Switzerland Swiss drug maker Roche will acquire a U.S. diagnostics company that develops technology used to create images of patients’ tissue samples.

Roche announced that it would acquire all of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based BioImagene for $100 million. BioImagene works in the field of digital pathology, a technology that allows the capturing, management and analysis of images of patients’ tissue samples, creating high-resolution images from glass microscope slides.