Researchers from Harvard announced Thursday a breakthrough in treating type 1 diabetes with stem cells.
Published in the journal Cell, their work involves making human insulin-producing beta cells from human embryonic stem cells in massive quantities required for pharmaceutical purposes and cell transplantation. This is notable because aside achieving the quantities needed for transplant; the researchers were able to manufacture beta cells that functioned like natural beta cells.
As an autoimmune metabolic condition, type 1 diabetes kills of pancreatic beta cells needed for producing insulin required for regulating glucose in the body. As such, the progress Harvard researchers made is very crucial, another step towards making beta cell transplants possible.
Doug Melton, team leader and Harvard Stem Cell Institute co-scientific director, hopes transplantation trials in humans will be carried out in a few years, but work has to be done first to uncover a way to keep the immune system from attacking the 150 million cells to be transplanted in a patient.
To address that concern, Melton is working with Daniel G. Anderson, an associate professor at MIT's Koch Institute, to develop a device for cell implantation. So far, Anderson and a few colleagues from MIT have managed to come up with a device that has protected implanted beta cells in mice for months from immune attacks.
Anderson commented that Melton's research is "an incredibly important advance for diabetes," opening the doors to limitless tissue supplies for diabetic patients in line for cell therapy.
There are 26 million Americans living with diabetes, about 10 percent of which depend on insulin injections. These people are likely candidates for beta cell transplants, representing the market that Melton's work can potentially benefit.
"We are now just one preclinical step away from the finish line. You never know for sure that something like this is going to work until you've tested it numerous ways. We've given these cells three separate challenges with glucose in mice, and they've responded appropriately; that was really exciting," shares Melton.
"Doug Melton and his colleagues continue to push stem cell science forward with their extraordinary work. This accomplishment is something none of us could have predicted 10 years ago, and I am excited to see where it all leads," boasted Drew Faust, Harvard President.
Mads Gurtler, Jeff Millman, and Felicia W. Pagliuca are co-authors with Melton on the study. Their work received funding support from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the JPB Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
