This 25-year-old from Tianjin is the first person with this autoimmune disease treated with cells taken from her own body.
A young woman with type 1 diabetes began producing insulin less than three months after receiving stem cell therapy, a regenerative medicine that uses stem cells to treat or prevent disease or injury. This 25-year-old girl from Tianjin (China) is the first person with this autoimmune disease treated with cells taken from her own body.
“Now I can eat sugar,” he said. Nature. More than a year after the transplant, the woman said she began “eating everything, especially stew.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
Experts have expressed joy and amazement at the results. “They have completely reversed the diabetes in the patient, who previously required substantial amounts of insulin,” said Dr. James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
How was the surgery done?
According to the study, published in the journal CellThe doctors followed the results of a separate group in Shanghai, which reported earlier this year that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The doctors said the islets were derived from reprogrammed stem cells that were extracted from the man’s own body.
Scientists have since reported that the man stopped taking insulin.
The woman later had the same procedure performed in June 2023 in a surgery that lasted less than half an hour. Doctors injected the equivalent of about 1.5 million islets into his abdominal muscles, a new site for islet transplants. Islet transplants are usually injected into the liver, where the cells cannot be seen. However, placing them in the abdomen helped doctors monitor the cells using MRI scans and potentially remove them if necessary.
Doctors said the effectiveness of the islets had previously been tested in mice and non-human primates.
According NatureThere have been several pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects nearly 500 million people worldwide. Most of them have type 2 diabetes, in which the body does not produce enough insulin or its ability to use the hormone decreases.
About three months after surgery, doctors say the woman’s body began producing enough insulin to live without any supplements, and she maintained that level of production for more than a year. Since then, he stopped experiencing the dangerous spikes and drops in blood glucose levels, which remained within the target range for more than 98 percent of the day.
How does stem cell transplant work for diabetics?
According to experts, islet transplantation, a procedure that involves transplanting islet cells from a donor’s pancreas to a recipient’s liver to help produce insulin to regulate blood glucose levels, helps treat the disease. However, doctors say there are not enough donors to help meet the growing demand and that recipients must use immunosuppressive medications to prevent the body from rejecting the donor tissue.
Stem cells can be used to grow any tissue in the body and can be grown indefinitely in the laboratory, meaning they potentially offer an unlimited source of pancreatic tissue.
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