on the horizon
By Sarah Grace Smith
New Hope
Technique that can control type 1 diabetes may hold the answers to curing type 1 diabetes
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s of 2018, about 1.6 million Americans, including 17,000 children and teens, had type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a faulty autoimmune response in the body which causes the immune system to attack and destroy vital insulin-producing beta cells. When beta cells encounter blood sugar, they perform the necessary action of secreting insulin which balances blood sugar levels in the body. Without beta cells, blood sugar levels can rise dangerously, which may lead to serious health problems including kidney failure, vision loss and heart disease. A study done by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found a new technique to control type 1 diabetes which could be effective for up to nine months.
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Researchers accomplished this by converting human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into insulin-producing beta cells. The transplantation of billions of these cells could lead to a type 1 diabetes cure. The team started out several years ago and discovered how to convert hPSCs, which self-renew in lab cultures and can differentiate into different cell types, including pancreatic beta cells to make insulin. However, the testing was limited and inefficient in controlling diabetes. Jeffrey R. Millman, Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at Washington University as well as the principal investigator of the study, explains in a Diabetes Research & Wellness Foundation article why previous methods were inefficient.
“A common problem when you are trying to transform a human stem cell into an insulin-producing beta cell – or a neuron or a heart cell – is that you also produce other cells that you don’t want,” he says. “In the case of beta cells, we might get other types of pancreas cells or liver cells.” While these other types of cells are harmless, they reduced efficiency in the process. In producing other cell types, the researchers were coming up with fewer beta cells than needed to cure type 1 diabetes. “The more off-target cells you get, the less therapeutically relevant cells you have,” says Millman in the article. “You need about a billion beta cells to cure a person of diabetes. But if a quarter of the cells you make are actually liver cells www.healthynewalbanymagazine.com
