Cell Replacement and Diabetes

Cell Replacement and Diabetes

Achieving normoglycemia is the goal of diabetes therapy and of the scientists working in this field.

There are potentially various ways to reach that goal, including the transplantation of cells exhibiting glucose responsive insulin secretion. However, to be applicable to the large number of people who might benefit from cell replacement, an unlimited supply of cells must be found. To address this problem, we have been developing cell lines from the human endocrine pancreas.

In one case, a cell line of a certain type has been developed from actual human islets that can be induced under some circumstances to differentiate into functional cells exhibiting appropriate glucose responsive insulin secretion.

Inducing differentiation is complex, requiring the activation of multiple signaling pathways, including those downstream of those involved in cell to cell contact and the glucagon like peptide receptor.

In addition, transfer of a gene called the PDX-1 gene is also necessary to render the cells competent for differentiation. However, it is now clear that many other genes are also involved in maintaining the commitment of the cells towards the cell lineage.

Understanding the commitment of genes required to establish and maintained a cell lineage commitment would be enormously helpful in effort to develop a cell line that can be used for the cell replacement therapies.

Here, we provide further information on the characteristics of cell lines that we have developed from human pancreas that are relevant to the development of a cell replacement therapy for diabetes.

The recent explosion of interest in cell replacement therapies for diabetes has been driven primarily by the dramatic progress in allogeneic islet cell transplantation.

For the first time it has actually been demonstrated that islet transplantation is a viable therapy for diabetes, and this scientific advance was largely dependent on the progresses made in immunosuppressive drug therapy that actually allowed for a steroid free regimen.

Further advances in this particular area are most likely to result in even better long term results as there is an evidence that even the current improved drug regimens are toxic to cells.

It is fairly clear that the use of stem cells could lead to cure a lot of diseases and that is also why the number of stem cell banks and cord blood banks has hugely increased. Cord blood collection, cord blood storage and stem cell storage are slowly becoming more and more common in private and public hospitals.

Cord blood banking uk and private stem cell banks are going into the mass market as we discover how helpful stem cells could be.