CBLB and diabetes mellitus: As genetic ablation of cblb is associated with spontaneous development of autoimmunity and increased susceptibility to experimental induction of autoimmune diseases (4, 5) it is not surprising that several groups later found links between genetic cblb variants and susceptibility to autoimmunity in an animal model for diabetes (141) as well as in various human autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes (142), lupus erythematodes (143), asthma (144), and multiple sclerosis (145–147).