a woman in Type 1 diabetes in China has been reversed thanks to a novel treatment that regenerates cells taken from the patient’s own body.
The groundbreaking cure turned these cells into personalized stem cells that were then used to grow clusters of fresh “islets,” hormone-producing cells in the pancreas and liver that help regulate sugars in the body.
“Now I can eat sugar,” said the 25-year-old, who lives in the city of Tianjing, where researchers say her body has successfully produced its own insulin for more than a year.
The treatment, which outside experts have called impressive and “wonderful”, builds on a similar milestone celebrated in Shanghai in April.
A woman with type 1 diabetes in China has been shown to be able to produce her own insulin. The breakthrough turned their own extracted cells into personalized stem cells, which were then used to grow clusters of fresh ‘islets’, hormone-producing cells in the pancreas that help regulate sugar.
The pancreas is an organ that, among other functions, produces insulin. Insulin is a natural hormone that our body uses to control the amount of sugar in the bloodstream. People with diabetes have problems regulating their blood sugar level due to pancreatic dysfunction
That April case was different because it involved transplanting stem cells into the liver, while the new method involved transplanting the newly created islets into the patient’s upper abdomen, near the pancreas.
Previous liver islet transplants have been more difficult to observe using non-invasive methods such as MRI, experts said, making it difficult to remove these groups of cells in the worst case, when the patient’s immune system rejects and attacks the transplant.
This new method, which inserts the islets just below the abdomen, allowed the researchers to monitor the progress of these islets using MRI with relative ease.
“They have completely reversed the diabetes in the patient, who previously required substantial amounts of insulin,” transplant surgeon Dr. James Shapiro, who was not involved in the new study, told the magazine. Natureapprovingly.
Other independent experts joined Dr. Shapiro, a medical researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in praising the breakthrough.
“If this applies to other patients, it will be wonderful,” diabetes researcher Daisuke Yabe of Japan’s Kyoto University told reporters.
Some medical professionals, however, expressed caution about these results, waiting to see if the team’s successful treatment can be replicated in even more patients.
Dr. Jay Skyler, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami who specializes in type 1 diabetes, said he would prefer to see if this 25-year-old test patient continues to produce insulin on her own for at least five years total, before considering that your case is truly “cured.” .’
General health experts have also noted that the technique of crafting personalized transplants using the recipient’s own cells is currently difficult to scale up profitably, meaning the price of this diabetes cure could be staggeringly high at first.
The medical researchers at Nankai University and Peking University in China behind this new study noted that the patient in their trial was already taking immunosuppressive medications for liver disease.
Therefore, it is unclear whether other patients’ bodies could reject a transplant of similar islets derived from their own personally harvested cells.
The June 2023 operation, as published by the team in the diary Cell in Wednesday, took less than half an hour.
‘The patient achieved sustained insulin independence starting 75 days after the transplant,” according to the Nankai and Peking University team writing in Cell.
People with diabetes often use blood sugar monitors, like this one pictured, to determine how much sugar is currently circulating in their bloodstream. This helps them decide what to eat and when to use insulin to better control their disease.
By the fourth month after her transplant, the 25-year-old patient’s total time in the desired or target blood sugar range jumped from 43.18 percent to 96.21 percent.
Their so-called “target time glycemic range” has been above 98 percent since then, the researchers reported.
Medical experts have hoped that transplants like this, which subtly guide cells taken from the patient to become stem cells and then used to grow more specialized cells to transplant back into the patient, might be less prone to rejection by the body. .
The hope is that this approach can negate the need for immunosuppressive medications, 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 with donor stem cells.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts, with the help of Dr. Shapiro, has begun a trial in a patient who also has type 1 diabetes but is not prescribed an immunosuppressive drug regimen.
“That trial is ongoing,” according to Dr. Shapiro.