Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Researchers must now work out how to protect cell transplants from the immune systems of people with type 1 diabetes.
Each year, surgeon Jose Oberholzer frees a few people with type 1 diabetes from daily insulin injections by giving them a transplant of the insulin-secreting β-cells that the disease attacks. But it is a frustrating process. Harvested from a cadaver’s pancreas, the β-cells are in short supply and vary in quality. And the patients must take drugs to suppress their immune response to the foreign cells, which can in turn cause kidney failure.
On 9 October, stem-cell researcher Douglas Melton of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues reported an advance that has the potential to overcome Oberholzer’s frustrations and allow many more people with type 1 diabetes to receive transplants. Melton and his team have achieved a long-term goal of stem-cell science: they have created mature β-cells using human stem cells that can be grown from a potentially unlimited supply, and that behave like the real thing (F. W. Pagliuca et al. Cell 159, 428–439; 2014). The next challenge is to work out how to shield these β-cells from the body’s immune response.
http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-success-poses-immunity-challenge-for-diabetes-1.16141
Each year, surgeon Jose Oberholzer frees a few people with type 1 diabetes from daily insulin injections by giving them a transplant of the insulin-secreting β-cells that the disease attacks. But it is a frustrating process. Harvested from a cadaver’s pancreas, the β-cells are in short supply and vary in quality. And the patients must take drugs to suppress their immune response to the foreign cells, which can in turn cause kidney failure.
On 9 October, stem-cell researcher Douglas Melton of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues reported an advance that has the potential to overcome Oberholzer’s frustrations and allow many more people with type 1 diabetes to receive transplants. Melton and his team have achieved a long-term goal of stem-cell science: they have created mature β-cells using human stem cells that can be grown from a potentially unlimited supply, and that behave like the real thing (F. W. Pagliuca et al. Cell 159, 428–439; 2014). The next challenge is to work out how to shield these β-cells from the body’s immune response.
http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-success-poses-immunity-challenge-for-diabetes-1.16141