Would you have ever imagined that the unwanted flabby "love handles" that we all so love to hate may actually hold the cure for diabetes?
Stem cells gleaned from human body fat, like from the deposition present in those "love handles" around your waist and belly, might help fight diabetes, reports a recent study conducted by Swiss scientists.
Diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which our immune system naturally starts attacking the insulin-creating beta cells that produce the essential insulin in the pancreas. Following the attack, it becomes incapable of flushing out the excess sugar from the body.
In the new study, stem cells harvested from the fatty flab of a 50-year-old man were genetically programmed and turned into these essential insulin-creating beta cells, enabling them to produce insulin like how the natural beta cells do. These newly developed cells subsequently removed the excess sugar from the blood, thereby making this discovery instrumental in combating diabetes.
The research was carried out by scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and led by Professor Martin Fussenegger, Biotechnology and Bioengineering.
"Most people have an overabundance of fat from which these stem cells can be harvested. We used liposuction to remove the fat which holds quite a lot of stem cells, so you don't actually need to take that much," said lead researcher Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Biotechnology and Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Once the cells are coded and introduced to glucose or fructose, these new insulin-creating beta cells tend to produce insulin just like regular beta cells. What's even more amazing is that the process takes only four days to complete.
The new beta cells still have a long way to go, however, as they are yet to be transplanted back into a diabetic patient to see how well they remove sugar from the body in actuality. If this massive breakthrough succeeds in its purpose, the need for daily, costly insulin injections diminishes greatly for diabetic patients. That's revolutionary!
Previous researches on similar grounds have made it possible to transplant the beta cells in human body, but the patients still required immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection. However, if all goes well with the new Swiss research, the need for intake of such drugs becomes nullified, as the reprogrammed beta cells are developed from patient's own stem cells.
The researchers are looking forward to beginning the human trials over the next five years. With this groundbreaking achievement, there may be hope for millions of people fighting diabetes every day. About 1.25 million Americans apparently suffer from Type 1 diabetes, and this predominantly occurs in children and young adults, according to the American Diabetes Association.
The findings of the research have been published in the Nature Communications journal.
Photo: Tony Alter | Flickr
