Promising Developments for Diabetics
May 8, 2013
JT News — According to the World Health Organization, 347 million people had diabetes worldwide in 2012, and it expects the number of those who develop the disease to double by the year 2030. In 2011, the International Diabetes Federation estimated that 366 million people had the illness and that number will climb to 552 million by 2030.
Type 1, often called juvenile diabetes, develops because the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to regulate the blood’s glucose content.
People with type 1 inject insulin to manage the condition, but Dr. Eli Lewis, head of the Clinical Islet Laboratory at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has developed a method for successfully transplanting healthy, insulin-producing cells into a diabetic pancreas.
He went further to discover a second use for an FDA-approved drug, already in use for other conditions, that prevents the inflammation and subsequent rejection of those new cells that often occur in these patients, who must then return to injecting insulin.
‘‘We transplant healthy pieces of pancreas, called islets. Those are the cells that are missing from the type 1 diabetes patient,” said Lewis. “It’s the closest thing that we can consider a cure.”
When Lewis applied the drug alpha1-antitrypsin to the grafted-in cells, the unexpected breakthrough was more than he and his team could have hoped for in the lab.
“It turns out, in a study that was done in collaboration with us and Harvard, that if you induce diabetes in a mouse, and you administer our therapy, you correct diabetes without the need for transplantation,” he said.
“We found a drug that we are going to use.”
In that study, researchers injected the drug into mice. After two to four weeks, the transplanted cells remained healthy and functioned properly in the pancreas. The study was so successful that researchers were able to discontinue the therapy.
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