(10/12-16) Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first

  • 投稿カテゴリー:Business

1.A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.

What are Stem Cell Receptors- CUSABIO

2.“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, China, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everythingespecially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

3.James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”


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4. The study, published in Cell today, follows results from a separate group of scientists in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes2.

5. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body, and he has since stopped taking insulin. The studies are among a handful of pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects close to half a billion people worldwide.

6. Most of the people have type 2 diabetes, in which the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or is less able to use the hormone. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks islet cells in the pancreas. Islet transplants can treat the disease, but there aren’t enough donors to meet the growing demand, and recipients must use immune-suppressing drugs to prevent the body from rejecting the donor tissue.


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7. Stem cells can be used to grow any tissue in the body and can be cultured indefinitely in the laboratory, which means they potentially offer a limitless source of pancreatic tissue. By using tissue made from a person’s own cells, researchers also hope to avoid the need for immunosuppressants.

Reprogrammed cells

8. In the first trial of its kind, Deng Hongkui, a cell biologist at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues extracted cells from three people with type 1 diabetes and reverted them into a pluripotent state, from which they could be moulded into any cell type in the body. This reprogramming technique was first developed by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan almost two decades ago.

9. But Deng and his colleagues modified the technique3: instead of introducing proteins that trigger gene expression, as Yamanaka had done, they exposed the cells to small molecules. This offered more control over the process.


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