Harvard stem cell researchers announced that they have made a giant leap forward in the quest to find a truly effective treatment for type 1 diabetes, a condition that affects an estimated 3 million Americans at a cost of about $15 billion annually:
With human embryonic stem cells as a starting point, the scientists are for the first time able to produce, in the kind of massive quantities needed for cell transplantation and pharmaceutical purposes, human insulin-producing beta cells equivalent in most every way to normally functioning beta cells.
Doug Melton, who led the work and who 23 years ago, when his then infant son Sam was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, dedicated his career to finding a cure for the disease, said he hopes to have human transplantation trials using the cells to be underway within a few years.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune metabolic condition in which the body kills off all the pancreatic beta cells that produce the insulin needed for glucose regulation in the body. Thus the final pre-clinical step in the development of a treatment involves protecting from immune system attack the approximately 150 million cells that would have to be transplanted into each patient being treated. Melton is collaborating on the development of an implantation device to protect the cells with Daniel G. Anderson, the Samuel A. Goldblith Professor of Applied Biology, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, and the Koch Institute at MIT.
Melton said that the device Anderson and his colleagues at MIT are currently testing has thus far protected beta cells implanted in mice from immune attack for many months. “They are still producing insulin,” Melton said.
Cell transplantation as a treatment for diabetes is still essentially experimental, uses cells from cadavers, requires the use of powerful immunosuppressive drugs, and has been available to only a very small number of patients.
While diabetics can keep their glucose metabolism under general control by injecting insulin multiple times a day, that does not provide the kind of exquisite fine tuning necessary to properly control metabolism, and that lack of control leads to devastating complications from blindness to loss of limbs.
About 10 percent of the more than 26 million Americans living with type 2 diabetes are also dependent upon insulin injections, and would presumably be candidates for beta cell transplants, Melton said.
“There have been previous reports of other labs deriving beta cell types from stem cells, no other group has produced mature beta cells as suitable for use in patients,” he said. “The biggest hurdle has been to get to glucose sensing, insulin-secreting beta cells, and that’s what our group has done.”
Courtesy : http://hsci.harvard.edu/news/stem-cells-billions-human-insulin-producing-cells
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