Medicine|Stem cell treatments based on one’s own cells are difficult to implement on a large scale, as they require a huge amount of research, says the Finnish professor.
A young one a woman’s type 1 diabetes was cured with a new type of treatment.
Stem cell treatment based on her own cells restored the ability to produce insulin to the body of a 25-year-old woman.
“I can now eat sugar. I enjoy eating everything, especially hotpot,” said the Chinese woman For the scientific journal Nature.
Hotpot is a Chinese fondue-type dish where pieces of food are dipped and cooked on the table in a boiling pot of broth.
Of the first type in diabetes, the insulin necessary for vital functions is not secreted, because the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas have been destroyed.
The woman was transplanted with islet cells that had been created from her own cells. The idea is to avoid the body rejecting the transplants.
Cells taken from the woman were first modified into stem cells, which can differentiate into several different cell types. The stem cells were then directed to develop into insulin-producing islet cells.
When the islet cells were placed in the woman’s abdominal muscle, they began to secrete insulin there.
Professor Timo Otonkoski.
After two and a half months, the woman no longer needed to give herself insulin. This is how he has managed for a year already.
“This is a great step forward, because this is the first indication that it is really possible to make such a treatment from one’s own cells,” comments the professor of medical stem cell research at the University of Helsinki. Timo Otonkoski.
Cell science journal published by research did not yet provide information on whether the woman’s body could reject the transplanted islet cells.
Rejection is not seen, perhaps because the woman has received medication that weakens the immune response due to a previous liver transplant.
The medication also prevents you from noticing whether the woman’s body could attack the cells in an autoimmune reaction. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system destroys the body’s own insulin-producing cells.
Second research team reports in the spring from an experimental treatment in which type 2 diabetes was treated with the same type of stem cell method. That study was also based on the patient’s own cells.
The almost sixty-year-old man has not had to take insulin since the transplant.
Otonkoski says that such stem cell treatments based on one’s own cells are difficult to implement on a large scale, as they require a huge amount of research work.
“It is much more realistic to think that the patient’s own cells are not used, but a cell bank from which the same cells can be used for many recipients,” Otonkoski explains.
In the world many patient studies are in progress, in which insulin-producing islet cells are produced from cells other than the patient’s own cells.
The challenge of these treatments, on the other hand, is that due to rejection, drugs that weaken the immune response must be used.
“Now a lot of work is being done to develop stem cell lines so that these drugs are not needed. Such human trials are already underway,” says Otonkoski.
Otonkoski and his groups are developing methods that can be used to create insulin-producing cells from stem cells.
In Finland, however, it is about basic research, and treatments are not tested on humans.