Islet transplantation, blood sugar and type 1 diabetes

New clinical trial results show that transplantation of pancreatic islets--cell clusters that contain insulin-producing cells--prevents severe, potentially life-threatening drops in blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. Researchers found that the treatment was effective for people who experienced episodes of severe hypoglycemia--low blood sugar levels that can lead to seizures, loss of consciousness and death--despite receiving expert care.

The Phase 3 trial was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), both part of the National Institutes of Health, and was conducted by the NIH-sponsored Clinical Islet Transplantation (CIT) Consortium. The investigators designed the study in consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enable potential future licensure of the manufacture of purified human pancreatic islets. The results appear online today in Diabetes Care.

"The findings suggest that for people who continue to have life-altering severe hypoglycemia despite optimal medical management, islet transplantation offers a potentially lifesaving treatment that in the majority of cases eliminates severe hypoglycemic events while conferring excellent control of blood sugar," said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.

Read more: Islet transplantation, blood sugar and type 1 diabetes

Transplantation of pancreatic islets--cell clusters that contain insulin-producing cells--prevents severe,
potentially life-threatening drops in blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes, according to new research

Source: ibreakstock/Fotolia

Novel Use of Insulin-Producing Beta Cells

While not having love handles in the first place would probably be an ideal situation, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich have found an exciting new use for the cells that reside in the undesirable flabby tissue—creating pancreatic beta cells. The ETH researchers extracted stem cells from a 50-year-old test subject's fatty tissue and reprogrammed them into mature, insulin-producing beta cells.

The findings from this study were published recently in Nature Communications in an article entitled “A Programmable Synthetic Lineage-Control Network That Differentiates Human IPSCs into Glucose-Sensitive Insulin-Secreting Beta-Like Cells.”

The investigators added a highly complex synthetic network of genes to the stem cells to recreate precisely the key growth factors involved in this maturation process. Central to the process were the growth factors Ngn3, Pdx1, and MafA; the researchers found that concentrations of these factors change during the differentiation process.

Read more: Novel Use of Insulin-Producing Beta Cells

The diagram shows the dynamics of the most important growth factors during differentiation of
human induced pluripotent stem cells to beta-like cells.

Source: ETH Zurich