Source: Good News Network
For the first time ever, researchers have successfully transformed human stem cells into mature insulin-producing cells, a major breakthrough in the effort to develop a cure for type 1 (T1) diabetes.
Replacing these cells, which are lost in patients with T1 diabetes, has long been a dream of regenerative medicine, but until now, scientists had not been able to figure out how to produce cells in a lab dish that work as they do in healthy adults.
“We can now generate insulin-producing cells that look and act a lot like the pancreatic beta cells you and I have in our bodies. This is a critical step towards our goal of creating cells that could be transplanted into patients with diabetes,” said Matthias Hebrok, director of the UCSF Diabetes Center and senior author of the new study, which was published in Nature Cell Biology.
T1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder that destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, typically in childhood. Without insulin’s ability to regulate glucose levels in the blood, spikes in blood sugar can cause serious organ damage and eventually death. The condition can be managed by taking regular shots of insulin with meals, but people with type 1 diabetes still often experience serious health consequences like kidney failure, heart disease and stroke.
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Patients facing life-threatening complications of their disease may be eligible for a pancreas transplant from a deceased donor, but these are rare and the wait time is long: Out of the approximately 1.5 million people living with type 1 diabetes in the US, only about 1,000 get pancreas transplants in any given year.
The procedure is also risky: recipients must take immune-suppressing drugs for life and many of the transplants end up failing for one reason or another. Transplants of just the pancreatic “islets” – clusters of cells containing healthy beta cells – are currently in clinical trials, but still rely on pancreases from deceased donors.That’s why Hebrok…
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