In patients suffering from type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks the pancreas, leaving patients in the end without the ability to naturally control blood sugar.
These patients should carefully monitor the amount of sugar in their blood, measuring it several times a day and then injecting insulin to keep the levels into a healthy range.However, it is difficult to achieve precise blood sugar control, and as a result patients face a series of long -term medical problems.
Many researchers believe that replaceing the cells of the pancreatic islets destroyed from healthy cells that could take care of glucose and insulin release surveillance would be a better treatment.
This approach has been used in hundreds of patients, but has a great inconvenience: their immune systems attack transplanted cells, which forces them to take immunosuppressive drugs during the rest of their lives.
Now, a new advance of Daniel Anderson's team of the Massachusetts Institute (MIT), in the American city of Cambridge, could offer a way to fully satisfy the promise of the transplant of cells of the pancreatic islets.Researchers have designed a material that can be used to encapsulate cells of human islets before transplanting them.In tests with mice, they showed that these encapsulated human cells could cure diabetes for up to six months, without causing an immune response.
These insulin producing cells, stimulated with glucose and stem cell derived, are protected within capsules that have been designed to be invisible to the host immune system.(Photo: courtesy of researchers)
Although it is necessary to investigate more, this approach has the potential to provide diabetics what for practical purposes would be a new pancreas, protected in addition to the immune system, which would allow them to control their blood sugar without taking drugs.
