One Less Roadblock to Eliminating Insulin Injections for Individuals with Type 1 Diabetes

foreign 's lab we work with type 1 diabetes and our focus is to make insulin producing cells in the lab type 1 diabetes is a very chronic disease with sunset oftentimes at early stages of life and what happens is that our immune system recognizes the better cells which reside in the pancreas as foreign so they attack and Destroy these cells thinking that these are not our cells these are foreign cells the primary function of the better cells is to make insulin and regulate our blood glucose and without them the individuals would be living with type 1 diabetes people living with type 1 diabetes rely on insulin injection through needles or parts to substitute for the absence of these cells cells now imagine if you can actually generate these cells from a stem cell population and Transplant them in the person living with type 1 diabetes and eliminates the need for insulin injection the only long-term therapy that has been tested is transplantation of better cells from organ donors this method is unfortunately limited by availability of donors so as a scientific Community I send many other labs around the world are trying to generate a renewable source of ourselves we work with a specific cell type called human embryonic stem cells and they are particularly interesting because they have the potential to give rise to all the cells in your body we are harnessing this potential to generate specific cells like liver cells or heart cells or in our case the insulin producing cells are found in the pancreas to replace and restore the missing cells in the body to do that we have technology to generate pancreatic cells in the lab we weren't sure how pure these cells are or in other terms if they could also give rise to other organs that are developmentally somewhat close to the pancreas such as the intestine or the stomach and to make sure that we are completely separating the population that are destined to become a pancreas from all the other cell types we identified a particular marker that is expressed by these cells what we were able to show in 2017 was that the cells purified with this marker were able to make beta cells in the petri dish what we didn't do then was to demonstrate that this purified progenitors could generate insulin producing cells in an experimental model and this is exactly what Yasin farida worked on recently and were able to publish this year to reach this point you know we had a lot of Trials and errors and we actually test multiple different methods that didn't work and to you know come up with this one particular method that not only works but it's efficient and it's also reproducible of course there are always limitations to a project and the limitation to this particular project is that when we make pure cells we just do not have enough product to work with with patients or in the clinic the most exciting part about this work is knowing that the cells that we make here at the Mexican stem cell Institute could be used in clinical trial and of course I'm biased but I hope that through the collaboration that we have with the ashmira transplant center the beta cells that we produce in the lab will be potentially used to treat people living with type 1 diabetes

Channel: UHN Research

Views: 28,553

Keywords: University Health Network, McEwen Stem Cell Insitute, Type 1 Diabetes, Insulin, Cell Therapy, Translational research, regenerative medicine, stem cells, Cristina Nostro, Yasaman Aghazadeh, Farida Sarangi

Id: 1tD0R3P534U

Length: 3min 37sec (217 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022