Mutated Liver Cells Offer Diabetes Cure
Patients with type-1 diabetes could soon be treated with transplanted pancreas cells grown from their own livers, according to Israeli research.
Using gene technology, the researchers have transformed adult human liver cells into insulin-producing beta cells.
The insulin-producing beta cells could be used to replace missing islet cells in patients with type-1 diabetes in the future, researchers believe.
The researchers infected adult human liver cells in vitro with a recombinant adenovirus containing a transcription factor for pancreatic and duodenal homeobox gene 1, which is responsible for pancreas development in the embryo.
Between 10 and 20 per cent of these infected liver cells developed into pancreatic beta-cells which stored insulin in secretory granules and produced insulin in response to glucose.
The researchers implanted these transdifferentiated human liver cells into the kidney capsule of diabetic and immune-deficient mice.
Following the transplant, the glucose levels of the mice decreased gradually and significantly over the 60 days of the study. But they returned to diabetic levels if the transplanted cells were removed.
Lead researcher Dr Sarah Ferber from the Endocrine Institute at Sheba Medical Center in Tel-Hashomer, Israel, explained that the finding could mean the end of insulin injections for patients with diabetes.
‘A diabetic patient could donate a liver biopsy that could be manipulated in vitro and induced to express insulin, and then be implanted back into the same patient,’ she said.
She added that this technique would overcome several of the obstacles which restrict the use of islet cell transplantation.
‘If the diabetic patient is the donor of their own insulin producing cells, then you bypass not only the restricted availability of pancreatic tissue, but also the problem of immune suppression,’ she said.
‘We still have more efficacy studies to complete but the technique is very promising. We hope that we will get to clinical trials in a few years.’
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Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. May 20, 2005