
The stonewall in finding an effective treatment for T1D is the short supply of viable options to created insulin-producing cells. With the magic of regenerative medicine, researchers are thinking this may be a thing of the past.
Every story about T1D starts with the autoimmune dysfunction. Putting the immune issue aside, a new approach to harvesting cells capable of becoming insulin-producing cells has been discovered.
The cells used in this study are fibroblasts. These are skin cells that play a vital role in wound healing. Although T1D isn’t a wound, per se, it definitely involves a few battles annihilating insulin-producing in the body.
Like boot camp, the fibroblast soldiers are conditioned for war in a solution to transform the cells into endoderm-like cells. Endoderm cells are then trained to become insulin-producing cells.
In an animal model, the transplantation of these insulin-producing cells not only secreted insulin but they also regulated glucose near normal levels. Historically this has been hit-or-miss with other sources to created insulin-producing cells.
To test the good results, the team removed the insulin-producing cells to verify that the normal glucose levels were due to the lab-created insulin-producing cells. Turns-out, the lab-generated insulin-producing cells are so life-life, they regenerated other insulin-producing cells that appeared 8 weeks later.
For me, it’s been almost 30 years that a viable source of insulin-producing cells seemed nonexistent. In the last year, I’ve read about 2 potential sources. Somebody put a flame to gas because things are really cooking in T1D research.
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