Transplant Breakthrough Brings Hope of Diabetes Cure

A NEW and revolutionary transplant technique has brought scientists one step closer to finally finding a cure for diabetes.

Researchers have perfected a way of ridding diabetics of their condition by using cells taken from just one donor, instead of up to four donors at the moment.

The breakthrough means potentially lifesaving transplants could become available to sufferers.

Great advances have been made in recent years in the use of donated cells to treat the disease. But one of the major obstacles has been that several donors are needed in order to harvest enough cells for just one transplant.

That means having up to four matching donors all available at the same time to treat one person, which severely limits the scope for transplantation.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has succeeded in treating patients using cells from a single donor.

According to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, all eight patients were completely free of the need for insulin injections a year after having a transplant.

British experts on diabetes claim the latest advance could potentially transform treatment of the disease.

‘If this can be reproduced, it is really exciting news as it could mean transplants become more widely available,’ says Jo Brodie from the charity Diabetes UK.

‘It is also another step nearer to finding a cure for type one diabetes. We will be following the research in this area very closely.’ Diabetes affects around 1.8 million people in the UK.

The disease develops when the amount of glucose in the blood is too high because the body cannot use it properly.

In type one diabetes, this is because the body cannot make any insulin, which is produced by the pancreas.

Insulin helps glucose enter cells, where it is used as fuel by the body.

In type two, symptoms often develop in adulthood because the body is either making too little insulin or what it is producing is not working properly.

This form of the disease is often linked with being overweight and having poor diet.

Sufferers need to try to keep blood glucose levels as normal as possible in cells. These are the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin, and they are injected into the patient’s liver.

order to avoid long-term damage to the eyes, kidneys, nerves, heart and major arteries.

The condition remains incurable, but scientists have been exploring whether transplants might be the answer for years.

In theory, the easiest solution is to use an entire pancreas from a healthy donor.

But such transplants are very difficult.

Instead, researchers have focused on harvesting islet Once there, they develop a blood supply and begin producing insulin that is released into the bloodstream.

Only a few patients in the UK have had the treatment and results suggest that even if it doesn’t get rid of the diabetes completely, it can dramatically reduce the amount of insulin needed to control it.

But because rejection of the donated cells is such a problem, it means millions are needed from several organs for it to have any chance of succeeding.

The U.S. team got round the problem by putting each patient on a regime of potent anti-rejection drugs before they even had their transplant. This helped to switch off the immune system in advance so it would not attack the donated material.

They then injected the patients with islet cells taken from just one donor per patient. A year later, the results showed all eight had stopped injecting insulin. However, as time went on, three did need to revert to the daily jabs to control their blood glucose levels.

Diabetes UK says it is too early to predict if the transplants will be widely available on the NHS and warns they may be limited by the drug costs, the need for specialist equipment and the number of donors available.