Diabetes Type 1 Producing Insulin Again

Could insulin injections get a matter of the by?

Gary Milner/Getty

Just switch them off and on again. "Rebooting" ordinary pancreas cells and then they produce insulin could potentially help people with type 1 diabetes manage their claret sugar levels without the need for daily injections. The approach is simpler and potentially safer than giving people stem cells that accept been coaxed into condign insulin-producing cells.

Type one diabetes occurs when the pancreas doesn't produce any insulin, which moves glucose from the bloodstream to the body's cells to be used for free energy. People with the status currently take to inject insulin to control their blood sugar levels.

To find an alternative treatment, Philippe Lysy at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint Luc – part of the Catholic Academy of Louvain (UCL) – in Belgium and his colleagues turned to cells from pancreatic ducts extracted from dead donors who weren't diabetic at the time of death. The duct cells don't produce insulin themselves but they have a natural tendency to grow and differentiate into specific types of cells.

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Offset, the team grew the cells in the lab and encouraged them to become insulin-producing cells by exposing them to fatty particles, which get captivated into the cells. The fatty particles carried with them the genetic code for making MAFA, essentially a genetic "switch" that binds to DNA in the nucleus and activates insulin product.

Then the team implanted these altered cells in mice with a form of diabetes to check that they secrete insulin in a mode that controls blood sugar levels. "The results are encouraging," says Lysy.

His colleague, Elisa Corritore, reported progress at this calendar week'southward annual meeting of the European Gild for Paediatric Endocrinology in Barcelona, Spain. The squad is preparing to submit the results for publication.

Off-the-shelf cells

If the work progresses well, the hope is that cells can be harvested from the pancreatic ducts of dead donors and converted in bulk into cells that make insulin. These "off-the-shelf" cells could then exist transplanted into people with type 1 diabetes to compensate for their inability to make the hormone themselves.

"We would hope to put the cells in a device nether the skin that isolates them from the body's immune system, so they're not rejected as foreign," says Lysy. He says devices like this are already being tested for their ability to house insulin-producing cells derived from stem cells.

Previous attempts to go round this trouble accept included coating insulin-producing cells in a seaweed derivative prior to transplant to keep them from beingness attacked by the recipient's allowed system.

Lysy says that considering the insulin-producing cells originate from pancreatic tissue there is less risk that they volition plough cancerous after the transplant. This has always been a worry with tissues produced from embryonic stem cells, as these have the capability to form tumours if any are left in their original state in the transplanted tissue.

The basic premise of the work looks solid, says Juan Dominguez-Bendala, director of stalk cell development for Translational Research at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine's Diabetes Inquiry Institute in Florida. "However, until a peer-reviewed manuscript is published and all the details of the work become available to the scientific customs, it is hard to judge if this advance represents a meaningful leap in the country of the art."

Lysy expects it will take between three and five years before the technique is set to be tested in people.

Article amended on 5 October 2015

Correction: We had the location of the Diabetes Research Institute wrong when this article was first published. This has at present been corrected.

More on these topics:

• stem cells
• diabetes
• transplants

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Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28279-rebooted-pancreas-cells-could-ease-type-1-diabetes/