“The results are promising”: a diabetic woman starts producing insulin again thanks to a stem cell transplant
A world first that offers hope of a cure to people suffering from type 1 diabetes. A resident of Tianjin, China, had cells extracted from her own body “reprogrammed” transplanted into her abdomen. A feat because a year later, she starts producing her insulin again, reveals a study published in the scientific journal “Cell” on September 25.
Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease characterized by excess sugar in the blood. The pancreas does not produce enough insulin, which has a regulatory role, sugar accumulates and blood sugar levels increase excessively. In the long term, the disease “causes damage, particularly to the small blood vessels of the skin, eyes, kidneys, etc.,” specifies the Vidal.
The choice of abdominal muscles
The pancreas cannot produce enough insulin because cells of the immune system attack the islet cells, which are responsible for producing insulin in the pancreas. As part of her treatment, this 25-year-old Chinese woman received stem cells from one’s own body using the somewhat modified cellular reprogramming technique.
In June 2023, she received the equivalent of 1.5 million islets of Langerhans in the abdominal muscles. A location which made it possible to monitor the cells using “magnetic resonance imaging and possibly remove them if necessary”, specify the researchers.
Three months later, the patient began to secrete insulin again and this is still the case one year later. “I can eat sugar now,” the young woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the magazine Nature.
A lack of donors
Islet transplantation is not new but, according to researchers, there are not enough donors to meet the growing demand. In France alone, more than 4.3 million people were treated for diabetes in 2022, compared to 3.5 million in 2015.
The other advantage of autograft could be to avoid immunosuppressive drugs, preventing the body from rejecting donor tissue. The hypothesis could not be verified in this case, as the patient was already receiving this type of treatment for a previous liver transplant.
“The results are promising, but they need to be reproduced in more people,” said Jay Skyler, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami in Florida. The results of two other patients qualified as “positive” should soon be presented.
