woman in Type 1 diabetes in China has been reversed thanks to a new treatment that rebuilds cells extracted from the patient’s own body.
This breakthrough treatment converts these cells into personalized stem cells, which then grow clusters of fresh “islets” in the pancreas and liver, hormone-producing cells that help regulate sugar in the body. was used for.
“I can now eat sugar,” said the 25-year-old from Tianjin. Researchers say her body has been successfully producing its own insulin for more than a year.
The treatment, described by external experts as astonishing and “amazing,” builds on a related milestone in Shanghai in April.
Chinese women with type 1 diabetes have been shown to be able to make their own insulin. This breakthrough allows her to transform the cells she herself extracted into personalized stem cells, which then grow clusters of fresh “islets” – hormone-producing cells in the pancreas that help regulate sugar. was used for.
The pancreas is an organ that produces insulin, among other functions. Insulin is a natural hormone that our bodies use to control the amount of sugar in our bloodstream. People with diabetes have difficulty regulating blood sugar levels due to pancreatic insufficiency.
That April case was different in that the stem cells were transplanted into the liver, but the new method involved transplanting newly created islets into the patient’s upper abdomen near the pancreas.
Experts say that traditional islet transplants to the liver are difficult to observe using non-invasive methods such as MRI, and that these cell clumps are difficult to see in the worst-case scenario, when the patient’s immune system rejects and attacks the transplant. It is said to be difficult to remove.
This new method of inserting islets just below the abdomen allows researchers to monitor the progression of these islets via MRI with relative ease.
“We have seen complete reversal of diabetes in patients who previously required large amounts of insulin,” transplant surgeon Dr. James Shapiro, who was not involved in the new study, approvingly told Nature.
In addition to Dr. Shapiro, a medical researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, other independent experts also praised this breakthrough.
“It would be great if this could be applied to other patients,” Daisuke Yabe, a diabetes researcher at Kyoto University in Japan, told reporters.
But some medical experts have expressed alarm at these results and are waiting to see if the team’s successful treatment can be replicated in more patients.
Dr. Jay Schuyler, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami who specializes in type 1 diabetes, wants to see if the 25-year-old test patient continues to make his own insulin for at least a total of five years before considering him truly “cured.” He said he wanted to. . ”
Medical experts also generally note that technologies that use a recipient’s own cells to perform personalized transplants are currently difficult to scale up cost-effectively. That means the price of this diabetes drug could be shockingly high in its early stages.
Medical researchers at China’s Nankai University and Peking University, who supported the new study, noted that the participants were already receiving immunosuppressive drugs for liver disease.
Therefore, it remains unclear whether another patient’s body will reject a transplant of similar islets derived from that patient’s own personally extracted cells.
Team Announces June 2023 Strategy diary cellon It took Wednesday Less than 30 minutes.
‘As the team from Nankai University and Peking University wrote in the journal Cell, the patients achieved sustained insulin independence starting 75 days after transplantation.
Diabetics often use blood sugar monitors like the one pictured here to find out how much sugar is currently circulating in their bloodstream. This helps you decide what to eat and when to use insulin to best manage your disease.
By four months post-transplant, the 25-year-old’s total time in the desired or target blood sugar range jumped from 43.18 percent to 96.21 percent.
Since then, her so-called “in-target blood sugar range” has been more than 98 percent, researchers reported.
Medical experts subtly induce extracted patient cells to become stem cells, which they use to grow more specialized cells for transplantation into the patient. Such transplants are less likely to be rejected by the body. I hope that it will be.
It is hoped that this method could eliminate the need for immunosuppressive drugs, which help prevent transplant rejection at the cost of weakening a person’s entire immune system.
Several groups, including private pharmaceutical companies, have begun testing their own islet cell transplant treatments, also created using donor stem cells.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Boston, Mass., in collaboration with Dr. Shapiro, has begun a trial in patients who also have type 1 diabetes but are not prescribed immunosuppressants.
“That trial is ongoing,” Dr. Shapiro said.
