A new treatment for diabetes has successfully cured a Chinese woman suffering from type 1 diabetes, as the treatment reconstitutes cells extracted from the patient’s own body.
The pioneering treatment successfully transformed these cells into specialized stem cells that were then used to grow clusters of “islets,” which are hormone-producing cells in the pancreas and liver that help regulate sugar levels in the body, according to the British newspaper, the Daily Mail.
The 25-year-old woman, who lives in Tianjin, has been successfully producing her own insulin for more than a year, researchers said.
The treatment, described by overseas experts as “amazing and remarkable”, is based on a similar breakthrough in Shanghai last April.
April’s case was different in that it involved transplanting stem cells into the liver, while the new method involved transplanting the newly made islets into the patient’s upper abdomen near the pancreas.
The researchers reported that liver islet cell transplants were more difficult to monitor with non-invasive methods such as MRI, making it difficult to remove these cell clusters in the worst cases where the patient’s immune system rejects and attacks the transplant.
This new method, in which islet cells are introduced directly under the abdomen, allowed researchers to monitor the progress of these cells via MRI with relative ease.
“If this applies to other patients, it would be great,” diabetes researcher Daisuke Yabe of Japan’s Kyoto University told reporters.
However, some medical professionals have expressed caution about the findings, waiting to see if the team’s successful treatment can be replicated in more patients.
Dr. Jay Schiller, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami who specializes in type 1 diabetes, said he would prefer to see if the 25-year-old test patient continues to produce insulin for herself for at least five years before her condition is truly “cured.”
Health experts also point out that the technology to manufacture custom transplants using the recipient’s own cells is currently difficult to scale up cost-effectively, meaning the price of this diabetes treatment could be staggeringly high at first.
The medical researchers at Nankai University and Peking University in China, who are overseeing the new treatment, note that their test patient was already taking an immunosuppressive drug to treat liver disease. So it remains unclear whether other patients might reject a transplant of similar islets derived from their own cells.
The procedure, which was performed in June 2023, took less than half an hour, according to the research paper published in the journal Cell .
“The patient achieved sustained insulin independence starting 75 days after transplantation,” the researchers wrote.
Medical experts hope that transplants like this, which skillfully direct a patient’s extracted cells to become stem cells and then use them to grow more specialized cells for transplantation back into the patient, will be less likely to be rejected by the body.
This method may bypass the need for immunosuppressive drugs, which help prevent transplant rejection at the cost of weakening a person’s entire immune system.
shafaq.com
