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UK Doctors Cure Type 1 Diabetes
ayden writes "The BBC is
reporting that a 61-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to be cured of type 1 diabetes thanks to a groundbreaking cell-transplant technique.
More
info
here."
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I'm off to 7-Eleven for a Pepsi Super Big Gulp!
Trolling is a art,
From someone who has both parents being diabetic, this is great news.
Sweet
I can't express enough the gratitude I have for those scientists who keep pushing through for advancement. Keep up the good work and keep those cures coming. I'm sure it'll be a while before the cure becomes readily available. Especially in the US due to strict USDA laws and regulations, but I hope it does well and progresses quickly.
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Is the anti-rejection drug regime. It can cause problems down the line with side-effects and with the immune system somewhat compromised, a susceptibility to infection.
If stem cell research continues at the rate it does, even this will be solved when cord blood stored at the patients birth is encouraged to differentiate into Eyelet cells, injected back into the patient years later and begin producing insulin. No rejection problems with your own-tissue-derived cells.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions.
USians, consider writing to your senator to protest Bush policies on Stem cell research. I'm not having a pop at him - fair enough if it's a moral issue to some folks. Just register your opinion with them. It can't hurt.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
...I see is the need for three pancreases for the process - it'd take a lot of donations to cure every Type 1 Diabetic out there. Stiil, they interviewed the guy on the radio, and he seems happy that he's got the flexibility, so its still an improvement (drugs compared to needles - tough choice)
If it's true, then this is hardcore!
[o]_O
This page has some information about people who have had this treatment in the US. One of these individuals was one of my science teachers in high school (until she got fired for some "frisky" behavior with members of the hockey team).
This is a cure for type I. Type I is what you get as a kid when your body never makes enough insulin. Type II is what you get when you consume so much sugar your body can't produce enough insulin.
Drink that Super Big Gulp and you will add to your chance of getting type II, which isn't covered by this treatment. (Not to mention all the other unhealthy things about soda in general)
The articles linked only say that this patient received three transplants. Nothing more.
Where is your source for the conclusion that every patient is going to need three transplants?
For all these brief articles tell us, maybe one procedure would be sufficient for a diabetic in better condition; Mr Lane sounded in pretty bad shape (falling into comas on a semi-regular basis) to this here diabetic.
For that matter, where do you get the "1 donated pancreas" == "1 islet cell transplant" equation? That's a mighty big leap to make given these scanty articles.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Unfortunately, it's a poor name. 50% of Type I diagnosises occur in people above the age of 18.
Just remember, It's those FDA restrictions (which I assume you mean as opposed to USDA which is the Department of Agriculture) that kept Thalidomide from being as widely used in the US as it was in Europe.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Sounds like it just turns Type-1 into Type-2 diabetes...
I kid you not.
It works great and it doesn't harm my septic tank!
Leave it for an hour or overnight and flush in the morning.
Now if pop can do that, imagine what it does inside you!
Pepsi works too.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I doubt this will become the standard of care for type I diabetics.
Why? This treatment is very complicated, costly, invovles suppressing the immune system (which has its own problems), and has had very limited success in the past. Pancreas transplantations are really nothing new (they've been doing them with bilateral kidney tranpslants for years); what's more novel here is that they've transplanted only the islet cells from the pancreas. The thing is, whatever causes type I diabetes in the first place, by killing the islet cells, has killed the transplanted iselt cells in previous attempts.
I'm doubtful but hopeful.
Oh, and for those with Type-II diabetes in the family, this has no relevance to you whatsoever. Sorry; the mechanism of the disease is different, though the results (too much sugar in the blood) is the same. In short, in type-I, the body doesn't produce enough insulin, and in type-II, the body is insulin-resistant (ie, less responsive to insulin).
finally mary tyler moore will shut the hell up.
Actually, since diabetes is an auto-immune disease, islet cells even from from your own body will be rejected. That's how Type I diabetes happens in the first place: Your immune system identifies your islet cells as invaders and destroys them.
What you say could be true, but it doesn't naturally follow. Even with the best technology available, induced islet cells are not identical to body grown islet cells, they're just close enough to make no difference therapeutically. An auto-immune response accidentally targets your cells by recognising cell surface markers which it shouldn't. There isn't the research doen to substantiate your assertion as far as I know, but it is a sensible conclusion. You could get around it, I think, by selection of cultured differentiated stem cells which do not express the cell surface marker that causes the difficulty, either by direct intervention via drug selection, or directed selection ie. cell sorting/ culturing of low expressed CD markers.
Either way, a immune suppression regime (to prevent the auto immune response) would be substantially lighter than that required to suppress total rejection of all aspects of the foreign cells in the transplant.
I should say, this is not my area of expertise, this is based on some paper reading, recall and conversations with other scientists.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Seriously, without antibiotics, has there been ANY medical advance in the past 50+ years? The adoption of plastic to improve hygiene?
It will be like the civil war, "He's got a scratch, get my bone saw." Only this time it will be a very *clean* bonesaw...
Of course, an approach sometimes used in treating lupus (see the section "Hematopoietic Stem Cell Therapy for Autoimmune Diseases") could always be used to overcome the autoimmune problem for good - destroy the immune system and repopulate it from scratch. A bit dangerous, though.
the research available is generally through scientific journals which charge a hefty fee for the ability to look through them. Even a service such as Medline which allows you to search through abstracts - not complete articles - isn't free to any member of the public.
The Institution I work at cannot afford much more than ~200 journal subscriptions, and it's a major UK research institute. Nature and its offshoots(like Nature Biochemistry, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Molecular Biology etc. etc. is horrendously expensive). The lack of available science to the layperson is a total scandal.
You could use local library facilities depending where you are based, for instance the British Library will be able to get almost anything on request. The Catch-22 is, you need some service like Medline to find papers you might be interested in, but without access, although you can request the papers themselves, you don't know what to look for. If you're at Uni, you should be able to get ATHENS access on behalf of your institution if you ask nicely. An ATHENS authorisation will allow you to use MEDLINE normally, which is just a search engine for scientific papers. Try searching for reviews in the last 5 years on a couple of keywords you might be interested in, if you get this far. They collate available information and explain enough that an intelligent layperson can follow without difficulty. I'll revisit this topic at work tomorrow and try and dig up specific papers for your query. All the techniques I mentioned in my previous post are fairly mundane and mature molecular biological techniques.
The suggested treatment in your url looks a lot like that for leukaemia, to be honest. The difference is the stem cells are supplied not by a bone marrow transplant, but through the stem cells previously isolated. It works, but its an EXTREMELY expensive and yes, medically dangerous, treatment again making extensive use of immune suppressive drugs (in leukaemia - they wouldn't be necessary in the postulated stem cell treatment).
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions in grandparent.
Diabetic fatties will have to wait on further research into the cellular nature of their disease. When I was at Uni (~3 years ago) they pinpointed the disease to interference in the specific process somewhere between Insulin Receptor recognising Insulin (which went fine) and actual cellular changes as a result of activation and dimerization of IR. It's almost certainly moved on since then, but there's been no "headline" discovery of exactly why some people start ignoring Insulin, or I'd probably have noticed it.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
This is being tried today.
Like insulin when it first appeared, it was cow and sheep insulin. It wasn't until years later that Humulin was developed (synthetic human insulin to you layman).
This is the first step and assuming it works as well as it appears from this write up, then wholesale cloning of the pancreas tissue will follow.
And for those that think this has no bearing on type II diabetis, you are shortshighted, at best, and wrong at worst. ANY time you cure a related desease, some of it becomes a significant gain to all the other related deseases.
I'm happy even if it only cures Type I. Even though I am a type II, my brother is a type I and it wll probably help him. It's too late for my Mom.
Not sure how this has been missed, but unless I'm mistaken, this is *not* the first time we've seen islet cell transplantation to correct Type I diabetes in patients with insulin-dependant diabetes mellitus (IDDM). From http://www.diabetes.org.uk/islets/trans/edmonton.h tm
"The 'Edmonton' protocol is a procedure developed in Canada for transplanting healthy islet cells into people with Type 1 diabetes.
The series of islet transplantations carried out by James Shapiro and his team since March 1999 has enjoyed levels of success that are unprecedented in the field of islet transplantation surgery.
Since the Edmonton transplantation research trial began, 48 patients have undergone 92 islet infusions in Canada. The most recent statistics from Edmonton (January 2003) state that one year after transplantation 84 per cent of patients remain insulin free and that after three years, 89 per cent of patients are still producing insulin. Previous islet cell transplants have only succeeded in around eight per cent of cases.
In addition to the work being carried out in Canada, approximately 200 patients have received islet transplants using the 'Edmonton' protocol or varients of the process in several centres worldwide. There are now almost 75 programmes planned to become activated within the next six to 12 months."
Also, check this link from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research:
http://www.ahfmr.ab.ca/publications/newsletter/Sum mer00/sum00/inside/diabetes.feat.htm
Seriously, without antibiotics, has there been ANY medical advance in the past 50+ years?
For all intents and purposes, the answer is no.
Of course, the pedant would argue the semantics of the word "medical", and offer up examples like
But if you define "medical breakthrough" as something along the lines of "a chemical [non-mechanical] agent that cures [not just treats the symptoms of] a disease [as opposed to a mechanical injury, like a broken bone, or a blocked artery]", then the hundreds of billions [trillions?] of dollars spent on "medical research" in the post WWII era by the western world has been, for all intents and purposes, an utter and complete waste of money.And if the "cure" for Type I Diabetes described here is nothing more than a partial pancreatic transplant in combination with an aggressive regimen of anti-rejection drugs, then I wouldn't classify it as a "medical" breakthrough - rather, it's just a new surgical technique.
PS: If you [or a loved one] ever get really, really sick, keep in mind that the only person who stands a chance in hell of doing anything beneficial for you is a surgeon, not a medical doctor.
PPS: Antibiotics, the true "medical" breakthrough of the 20th century, are primarily a tool of the surgeon, not the medical doctor.
Reporting (on Quirks & Quarks sci show)
success rates aproaching 90% from memory,
albeit with some side-effects.
The idea was to transplant islet cells
from a healthy person into the Type 1
sufferer.
People queued for the chance to join the
medical trials around the world.
Then came word that the transplants could
come from pigs, instead of human donors...
So, what's new...?
And while the Edmonton Protocol is exciting news for diabetics, it's somewhat premature to call this a cure. It requires two harvested pancreases for each transplant, and there were not a huge number of such donations available. I think there was something like 1,000 available in Canada annually, which wouldn't even come close to keeping up with the rate of new diagnoses.
Of course there is room for improving the harvest rate for islet cells, and there's a great potential for bio-engineering them - perhaps with stem cells. So this protocol may eventually be useful for all diabetics - and not just the handful of cases that can currently get treated.
There's also a significant question of the long-term effects of the anti-rejection drugs. Still, I'd be happy to risk it personally, if I'm ever given the chance... after 31 years on insulin, I'd be happy to trade to a new drug;)
[Oh, and here are some clickable links that the parent post tried to submit: http://www.diabetes.org.uk/islets/trans/edmonton.h tm
and http://www.ahfmr.ab.ca/publications/newsletter/Sum mer00/sum00/inside/diabetes.feat.htm]
Doctors in Edmonton AB Canada developed this technique about 5 years ago. Islet cells (the ones that produce insulin) are removed from cadavers and transplanted into Type 1 diabetic's livers. Apparently islet cell antibodies won't attack "foreign" cells as aggressively in the liver but the patient still needs to take immune suppressant drugs. The down side to all this is that it takes the pancreases of about 5 cadavers to extract enough islets cells for one injection and a full treatment might take several injections. The solution to this is obviously stem cell research but you won't find this breakthrough research being conducted in the US or in any country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church.
"The solution to this is obviously stem cell research but you won't find this breakthrough research being conducted in the US or in any country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church."
Patently false. Stem cell research != fetal stem cell research.
How many times is this ignorant misconception going to be thrown around on Slashdot before people learn to differentiate between the two?