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A groundbreaking discovery has recently brought hope to millions of people living with type 1 diabetes around the world. In a world first, scientists have successfully used stem cell therapy to reverse type 1 diabetes in a woman.
This achievement is being hailed as a major medical breakthrough, as it offers a potential cure for a disease that, until now, could only be managed but not cured.
Type 1 diabetes is a serious condition that usually starts in childhood or early adulthood. In people with the condition, the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.
Insulin is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels. Without it, blood sugar can spike to dangerously high levels. Over time, this can lead to severe health complications, such as heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure and blindness.
People with type 1 diabetes need to take insulin injections or use insulin pumps every day to manage their blood sugar levels. Despite these treatments, managing the disease can be difficult, and patients often face lifelong difficulties. That’s why this new stem cell therapy has generated so much excitement — it could offer a real solution.
The average human body is composed of about 37.2 trillion cells, which is 300 times the number of stars in our galaxy. All our adult cells come from a single cell, called the fertilised egg (or zygote) which during our development will divide and differentiate into specialised cells and adult stem cells. The zygote is the initial stem cell capable of generating a new person.
Adults stem cells are special cells in the body that can turn into a limited number of cell types. Scientists have been studying stem cells for years and trying to re-program specialised cells into stem cells, hoping to use them to treat various diseases.
One of the most exciting aspects of stem cells is that they can replace damaged or missing cells in the body. At the University of Central Lancashire, my research team is using induced-pluripotent brain stem cells which were reprogrammed from skin cells of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. We aim to learn more about the degenerative brain disease and its development in a petri dish without further invasive techniques.
In the case of type 1 diabetes, scientists wondered if stem cells could be used to replace the insulin-producing cells that the body had destroyed. It is extremely difficult to get stem cells to behave like the specific insulin-producing cells needed in the pancreas.
In a recent trial, scientists at Peking University in Beijing took cells from a donor and modified them in the lab to become insulin-producing cells. These newly developed cells were then implanted into patients with type 1 diabetes.
Remarkably, the cells began producing insulin on their own, allowing the patients to regulate their blood sugar levels after two and a half months without requiring daily insulin injections.
This is why the therapy is being referred to as a potential “cure” for type 1 diabetes. While it’s still early days, the results are incredibly promising, and the therapy could become widely available in the near future if further large trials are successful.
Hurdles still to overcome
One issue is the body’s immune system, which could attack the newly transplanted cells as part of diabetes type 1 conditions. Scientists are working on ways to prevent this and ensure that the transplanted cells are behaving over several years similarly compared to the initial phase in a petri dish.
Making the therapy accessible to more people will be another big challenge. If approved, stem cell treatments are expensive and complicated, so researchers are looking for ways to make the process more scalable while using the patient’s own cells to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells.
Despite these hurdles, the recent discovery has created a wave of hope and optimism for patients suffering from type 1 diabetes. Stem cell therapy is showing us that it might be possible to truly cure diseases that have long been considered only manageable and incurable.
Stéphane Berneau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
