Stem Cell Therapy for Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong condition where enough insulin is not produced from the pancreas keeping blood sugar levels high is difficult for most patients to manage without medications.

Recently developing a promising approach for treating this condition is reported in the journal Nature Communications by Scientists at the Salk Institute using stem cells to create insulin-producing cells (called beta cells) to replace non-functional pancreatic cells with proven results in mouse model.

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‘New stem cell therapy can be effective to treat type 1 diabetes.’

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"Stem cells are an extremely promising approach for developing many cell therapies, including better treatments for type 1 diabetes," says Salk Professor Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, the paper’s senior author.

The investigators started with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) having the potential to become any kind of cell found in the adult body coaxed into beta cells in a stepwise fashion that mimicked pancreatic development using various growth factors and chemicals resulted in about 10 to 40 percent of cells becoming beta cells.

The created beta cells were transplanted into a mouse model of type 1 diabetes with a modified immune system that would not reject transplanted human cells reduced their high blood sugar level to normal range.

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This finding represents that the transplanted hPSC-derived beta cells were biologically functional needs more clinical trials to assess the safety before initiating in humans for treating type 1 diabetes.

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Source-Medindia

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