SCIENTISTS hope to create a vaccine for Type 1 diabetes “within a generation” through a new study at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

National charity Diabetes UK named the hospital as one of 15 centres across the country working over the next decade to develop a vaccine for people at high risk of contracting the disease. More than 2,700 people across Oxfordshire have Type 1 diabetes, which is treated with daily shots of insulin and sometimes even pancreas transplants.

Studies are being set up to test treatments that could lead to a vaccine.

Sixth-form student James Lambert was diagnosed as Type 1 diabetic when he was nine.

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The Cholsey resident said: “It’s traumatising for a nine-year-old because you have people trying to stick needles in you.”

The 17-year-old said his condition turned his world upside down when he was 13, when he found out certain jobs would not be open to him. He added: “I always wanted to go into the air force and be a pilot but as a diabetic you can’t join any of the [armed] forces.

“After finding out I lost a lot of motivation in school work and then struggled.”

He has since begun his A-Levels at D’Overbroeks College in Banbury Road and wants to study law or psychology at university.

James hopes the work done by the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDM) and Oxford Children’s Hospital, both based at the JR, will stop other children from having to limit themselves.

He said: “I hope they find a vaccine so there will be a generation of children who can realise their dreams.”

Six potential treatments will be tested on trial patients to help refine and create the world’s first trial vaccine, which experts hope could could stop people developing the disease.

Work at Oxford, which was picked out for its standards of research, would be pulled together with that done at the other 14 centres, including London, Liverpool and Sheffield.

Director of research at Diabetes UK Dr Alasdair Rankin said: “None of this will be easy or happen overnight.

The first vaccines will probably help people to delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes rather than preventing it. But even this would help to reduce the risk of serious complications, such as stroke, blindness and heart attacks.

“In the longer term, a fully effective vaccine would represent a huge medical breakthrough.”

Diabetes UK received £4.4 million of funding for the trial from Tesco and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

Chief executive of JDRF Karen Addington said: “Our major search for a vaccine takes place within a global push, by some of the world’s very best scientists, to consign this lifethreatening condition to history.”