As of 2018, about 1.6 million Americans, including 17,000 children and teens, had type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a faulty autoimmune response in the body which causes the immune system to attack and destroy vital insulin-producing beta cells.
When beta cells encounter blood sugar, they perform the necessary action of secreting insulin which balances blood sugar levels in the body. Without beta cells, blood sugar levels can rise dangerously, which may lead to serious health problems including kidney failure, vision loss and heart disease.
A study done by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found a new technique to control type 1 diabetes which could be effective for up to nine months. Researchers accomplished this by converting human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into insulin-producing beta cells.
The transplantation of billions of these cells could lead to a type 1 diabetes cure.
The team started out several years ago and discovered how to convert hPSCs, which self-renew in lab cultures and can differentiate into different cell types, including pancreatic beta cells to make insulin. However, the testing was limited and inefficient in controlling diabetes.
Jeffrey R. Millman, Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at Washington University as well as the principal investigator of the study, explains in a Diabetes Research & Wellness Foundation article why previous methods were inefficient.
“A common problem when you are trying to transform a human stem cell into an insulin-producing beta cell – or a neuron or a heart cell – is that you also produce other cells that you don’t want,” he says. “In the case of beta cells, we might get other types of pancreas cells or liver cells.”
While these other types of cells are harmless, they reduced efficiency in the process. In producing other cell types, the researchers were coming up with fewer beta cells than needed to cure type 1 diabetes.
“The more off-target cells you get, the less therapeutically relevant cells you have,” says Millman in the article. “You need about a billion beta cells to cure a person of diabetes. But if a quarter of the cells you make are actually liver cells or other pancreas cells, instead of needing a billion cells, you’ll need 1.25 billion cells. It makes curing the condition 25 percent more difficult.”
The new research technique creates far fewer off-target cells while improving beta cell functionality.
The new approach targets cell cytoskeletons, the internal scaffolding which gives a cell its shape and allows it to interact with its environment. The cytoskeleton takes in the physical cues from its environment and transforms them into biochemical signals.
By understanding these signals, the researchers were able to create beta cells more efficiently.
“Previously, we would identify various proteins and factors and sprinkle them on the cells to see what would happen,” says Millman. “As we have better understood the signals, we’ve been able to make that process less random.”
With this new technique, the researchers transplanted “islet-sized aggregates” of beta cells differentiated from hPSC into mice with type 1 diabetes. This process rapidly reversed type 1 diabetes and, in some mice, even cured it.
“These mice had very severe diabetes with blood sugar readings of more than 500 milligrams per deciliter of blood – levels that could be fatal for a person,” Millman says in a Medical News Today article, “and when we gave the mice the insulin-secreting cells, within two weeks their blood glucose levels had returned to normal and stayed that way for many months.”
These findings provide hope that this new technique will be able to reverse and cure type 1 diabetes in humans.
From here, researchers will conduct more tests over longer periods of time and in larger animals in order to produce beta cells that could potentially help those who require insulin injections.
Sarah Grace Smith is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
