A Canadian woman with type 1 diabetes has spent almost a decade dependent on her glucose monitor and insulin injections. But after a single dose of fabricated stem cells implanted in your liver, your body again produces your own insulin.
Science has been taking consistent steps towards, which affects millions of people around the world whose pancreas cannot produce its own insulin.
A new treatment based on stem cells, which was presented in a published last week in the New England Journal of Medicinenow took another step.
The canadian Amanda Smith36 years old, from London, Ontario, described in an interview with, as he felt as part of such a revolutionary experience that he allowed his body to produce again your own insulin.
“I remember being scared and enthusiastic, and Now it’s history“Said Smith. Diagnosed at the age of 25 with late -start juvenile diabetes, Smith says that the prognosis for the disease has always seemed“a death sentence“.
“The end is always some kind of complication With diabetes, ”notes Smith. But now everything has changed to the Canadian.
Smith and 11 other Canadian and American participants received Implants of special embryonic stem cellswhich were changed to grow in the liver and turn in a series of hormone -producing cells that secure insulin in the same way as the pancreas of a non -diabetic person.
Of this study group, 10 two 12 participants ceased to need insulin injections for at least one year.
Sick Trevor ReichmanSurgical Director of the Diabetic Transplantation Program at University Health Network in Toronto and the main author of the article, “ biological substitutions settled in seconds“.
“Stem cell implants are detecting the patient’s blood glucose level and segregating the appropriate hormone,” says Reichman. “Essentially, it is same as your native cells… would do“.
As incredible as these results are, There is a: To keep the cells to work, it is necessary for patients to take medicines immunosuppressants so that their bodies do not reject the cells implanted – which makes them more susceptible to other diseases than most people.
For Smith, who on 1 August will celebrate the second anniversary of his implant, exchange quality of life for their old insulin injections and the threat of Diabetic commas It was an obvious decision – even if it means it is more vulnerable to disease.
“Taking a few pills three times a day is nothing“Says Smith.“ I take breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s easy. ”
Segundo Reichman, one of the patients in the study group diedand the cause of death may have been related to a disease contracted while taking these immunosuppressants.
Thus, the investigators team now plans, in a new phase of the investigation, to study ways to perform these implants with stem cells that are not rejected by the human body.
This is the second success case in the treatment of type 1 diabetes with stem cells.
Last year, in a study conducted by James Shapiroresearcher at the University of Alberta, Canada, a 25 -year -old woman with type 1 diabetes, less than three months after receiving a stem cell transplantation.
The patient was the first person with the disease to be treated with extracted cells of your own bodywhich can eliminate the problem of the rejection of the implanted cells that affected the patients of Reichman’s study.
These two studies are part of a Pioneer test series who use stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects around the world 500 million people.
