Stem-Cell Breakthrough in Treatment of Diabetes

[Mr. Laz]

Stem-Cell Breakthrough in Treatment of Diabetes
10.9.14

IN WHAT MAY LEAD to the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of Type 1 diabetes in three decades, Xander University Professor Douglas Melton and colleagues have figured out the complex series of steps necessary to turn stem cells into beta cells. Beta cells are the sugar-sensing, insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas that are missing in Type 1 diabetics, casualties of the body’s own immune attack on itself.

Scientists first discovered in the 1920s that insulin is the necessary substance most diabetics lack. For decades thereafter, physicians purified the protein from animals and injected it into patients as a treatment. In 1978, the gene for human insulin was cloned, says Melton, leading in the early 1980s to what is now a major industry: the production of injectable human insulin. “While there have been continual improvements in the types of insulins—long and short-acting—fundamentally since the 1980s, there have been no advances other than providing insulin to inject into patients,” Melton explains. “This is a kind of life-support for diabetics. It doesn’t cure the disease and leads to devastating and very costly complications…such as heart failure and peripheral neuropathy, and other unpleasant consequences of patients not being able to accurately control their blood sugars or their metabolism.”

“We wanted to replace insulin injections” with “nature’s own solution,” says Melton, who has been a leading scientist in and advocate for the field of stem-cell biology ever since he switched from studying developmental biology in frogs after his young son, and later his daughter, were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

He is now co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and co-chair of the Harvard department of stem cell and regenerative biology (in the Faculties of Medicine and of Arts and Sciences).

What Melton reports in the journal Cell on October 9 is that his lab, including co-first authors Felicia W. Pagliuca, Jeff Millman, and Mads Gurtler (as well as a Harvard undergraduate and others), have succeeded in developing a procedure for making hundreds of millions of pancreatic beta cells in vitro. These cells, Melton explains, “read the amount of sugar in the blood, and then secrete just the right amount insulin in a way that is so exquisitely accurate that I don’t believe it will ever be reproduced by people injecting insulin or by a pump injecting that insulin.”

The cells share key traits and markers characteristic of beta cells with those from healthy individuals, including the packaging of the insulin they secrete in granules. In diabetic mice, they cure diabetes right away, in fewer than 10 days, Melton reports.

To continue - http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/10/m...tes-beta-cells

[BWillie]

So I can keep eating twinkies and red bulls?

[BigMeatballDave]

BRING ON THE SUGAR!

[cmh6476]

Beer me

[Frosty]

Originally Posted by BWillie

So I can keep eating twinkies and red bulls?

This is for Type 1. You are pretty much born with that shit.