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First Successful Cell Transplant Cures Diabetes
Iphtashu Fitz writes "A few months ago the 50th anniversary of the first organ transplant was celebrated. Over those 50 years surgeons have learned how to sucessfully transplant many organs and other body parts. Now it seems that Japanese surgeons have added yet another successful transplant to the list, having recently transplanted insulin-generating cells, known as Islets of Langerhans from a mother to her diabetic daughter. Three months after the surgery both mother and daughter appear to be completely healthy. Although the daughter no longer needs insulin she still needs to take powerful drugs to keep her immune system from rejecting the new cells. Researchers also still don't know if this procedure would work in many people with type 1 diabetes since in many of those cases their own immune system has destroyed their Islet cells."
What will China say about that?
The Custom Mary
With the advent of this new treatment, maybe thousands of diabetics could have the ability to live insulin-injection free. Yes, they do have to take anti-rejection drugs, but it is no different then taking the drugs for an organ transplant. Even if this is only a prelude to a new, more permenent treatment, the possibilities of this doing good with this new treatment is huge.
Here's the BBC article referenced by the post:
. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4459523.stm
And, here's a related one from last month:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4332163
Thought it has the same conclusion
Still valuable research, no doubt.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This procedure was, I believe, developed and first performed in Canada. The idea has been around for a few years.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
So the woman is not taking insulin anymore, but she is taking immuno-suppressants.
This means she has switched from one type of life-long medication to another type of life-long medication. Is this really a change for the better?
So, if implanted Islets can be used to replace insulin producing cells, then ones grown from the patients own stem cells can too. And without rejection.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Is the pancreas like the liver, that if you take part out of a living human, transplant it in another person, both livers will grow back to their normal size. Will that happen with a pancreas, or is the mother stuck with 50% of her pancreas.
Nor is it clear whether the procedure would be as effective in people, like most of those with type 1 diabetes, whose own immune cells have destroyed their insulin-producing pancreatic cells.
How does this happen? Is this a problem with the immune system, or is it a problem with the pancreas?
If the immune system is responsible for the damage to the pancreas, then transplants won't work. We need to find out the cause.
If the problem is with the pancreas, I think a far more effective treatment will be genetic therapy. Since genes control how much of a protien or enzyme is made, if the gene is damaged due to mutation or any reason, that tissue might not function normally. If we can advance gene therapy, we can replace the malfunctioning DNA with working DNA.
I was told in high school health class that diabities is almost 100% due to diet or lack of exersize. I am glad to see we are getting better reasons than "he's fat and does not exersize, so that is why he got sick".
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
A friend of my mothers about 3 years ago had this same type of surgery done. She had type-II diabetes since she was a teenager and had required shots. She no longer has to take insulin shots twice daily which has now been replaced by the pill.
/.ers out there probably have friends with type-II diabeties and don't even know it.
I saw someone post something about whether this would actually change quality of life, and I can say from seeing those close to me, yes. My father died of pancratic cancer, and the cancer caused type-II diabeties, and the ammount of effort that had to be put into regulating insulin levels, taking your shots, checking your blood, it all adds up. To just take a pill in the morning instead is considerably easier.
Personally, I wouldn't like having to check my blood 3 times a day, and give myself injections on top of that. I'm sure most other people wouldn't like that either, to have that replaced by a pill would be a god send.
It is something that hits close to home, and I'm sure that many of you
-PB_TPU_40 The trick to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
As far as I know (being type I), immunosuppressant drugs are considered worse than insulin in general. IF your diabetes is well regulated, your health can be perfect. Immunosuppressants on the other hand seem to cause some risks.
The situation is different if the diabetes is not well regulated, for instance if the kidneys have been destroyed. In the latter case, when a kidney transplant necessitates immunosuppressants anyway, I believe it is quite common to also implant an extra pancreas (hopefully from a dead donor...) and this way curing the diabetes.
As I read the article the new thing is not to implant pancreas tissue, but rather that the donor is alive, which will of course increase the availability a little bit.
Insulin is not classified as a 'medication', but a hormone. I myself am diabetic (type 1) and would rather continue to take my 6 injections a day than have an operation and use drugs to combat my immune system. I really look forward to the day when there's a cure. I wish the japanese girl all the best tho !
This isn't new, unfortunately. Islet cell transplants have been happening for many years now. The first cases I heard of were in Russia, using islet cells from aborted foetuses (I gather such things are more readily available in Russia). But they've been doing it on a small scale in the UK for years, too, with success.
I'm not sure why we haven't seen this become a mainstream solution yet, but personally, I'm not holding my breath for any of the diabetes solutions that get mentioned by news reporters regularly. News services seem to like to this story so much that they declare a new "cure" each year... except that it'll be years before most people get it, if they get it.
What you should be asking yourself is "why did I post such a blatant invitation for trolls to come up with all kinds of snotty answers?"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/artic/pancreatic_isl et_transplantation_niddk.htm
"Scientists have made many advances in islet transplantation over the past 25 years. Dr. James Shapiro and colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, have used a new procedure called the Edmonton Protocol to treat eight patients with type 1 diabetes. These patients have been completely freed from insulin injections since the first transplant in mid-1999."
and:
http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/cs/programs/pancr eas/research.html
"The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada was the first group to successfully maintain islet transplants using islets from two organ donors and a new steroid free immunosuppressive regimen."
and:
http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/pancreaticis let/
"Scientists have made many advances in islet transplantation in recent years. Since reporting their findings in the June 2000 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, have continued to use a procedure called the Edmonton protocol to transplant pancreatic islets into people with type 1 diabetes. A multicenter clinical trial of the Edmonton protocol for islet transplantation is currently under way, and results will be announced in several years. According to the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN), as of June 2003, about 50 percent of the patients have remained insulin-free up to 1 year after receiving a transplant. A clinical trial of the Edmonton protocol is also being conducted by the ITN, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International."
Still... an amazing area of research and one hopes it leads to a more generally available cure for diabetes (without all the immunosuppresive side effects).
If you read on to the bottom of the wikipedia article:
And following that link for Denise Faustman, you'll see that she is noted for transplanting islet cells.
So, I don't think joinlee.org would be such a bad place to donate to.
....she still needs to take powerful drugs to keep her immune system from rejecting the new cells
If these drugs are suppressing her immune system then it could make her more at risk to other illnesses. I used to know someone who had a kidney transplant and he lived a reasonably normal life for 10+ years. But he died because the drugs to suppress his immune system meant that he caught an infection he was unable to fight off.:(
The [offline] article I read on this indicated that this case was unusual in that the girl did not have your standard type 1 diabetes but had developed it due to an inflammation of the pancreas when she was younger. As a result her immune system was not attacking her beta cells so this case is rather different from that in most type 1s whose bodies would attack implanted cells normally.
Me American. Thump bible. That cure all! Bush say so.
You can't seperate the ethical questions from the scientific ones. If you are pissed off at how society anwsers ethical questions, then offer something more insightful to the debate than"Me American. Thump Bible".
It is true in some instances a majority of the voters don't want scientific advancement at the cost of their moral values. Maybe stem cell research can save the lives of people with parkinsins disease. But does society want an added value to more aboritions "Hey, the dead baby was good for something after all, lets have more of them". Is a life a commodity?
Without ethics, it is possible we would have places where people would broker in body organs. Have an extra kidney? We're buying! The poorest would sell a kidney, and the richest would get his transplant. But we don't have that system because or values and ethics say it is wrong.
When it comes to any research, we have to identify how we will continue. To some it is oppressive, like when the FDA takes so long to approve a drug. To others it is needed caution.
So, how about explaining your position a little better? All I can tell from your original post is you seem to have anger toward the Bible and Bush.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Despite being unbelievably cynical (first "another internet loser asking for money" then "don't donate to organizations"), how do you propose donating money directly to "who it helps" (diabetics?) for research to cure a disease. A large project needs a leader, and an individual diabetic isn't going to cure himself.
I'm not a huge fan of Iacocca, but he's probably got juge amounts of money near the end of his life, is broken up about his wife's death, and wants to use that money to make sure others don't go through his pain. He's asking you to be part of that.
You don't have to be. If you don't want to help diabetes research, then fine. If you don't like this particular problem, then fine, too. You can do anything you want with your money, but geez, you should perk up a little and not use lame excuses like "I have heard of charity groups telling hospitals or universities" to destroy the concept of charitable contribution.
Being overly cynical may help you from getting hurt, but it will also take away any joy that you might get from life by, say, thinking "The US$20 that I donated to research ended up helping to save thousands of lives."
On the other hand, if the research goes through successfully, it'll probably just get locked up in patents and made prohibitively expensive by corporations... Maybe you can stay cynical.
Put identity in the browser.
The short answer is No. Immuno-suppressents are not as bad as they sound. Taking them is no big deal.
I've been on them for 4 years, since my kidney transplant. Contrary to popular belief they do not make you much more susceptible to every cold and flu going around. Obviously you are slightly more vulnerable to viral infections.. but in the last 4 years I have not suffered from any more illnesses than anyone else I know.
Generally its just one pill a day which replaces dozens of pills, a few injections and in my case, dialysis.
1: abortions are legal and its the persons choise if they decide to have one and frankly it is not our place to force our morality on others (ethics dont define what you decide you want done to yourself , it defines how you act to others IMO)
,then would it not be better to get something usefull out of them,If you belive that they were living thinking beings (not the debate as to if that is true or not) and there is nothing(ethicaly or moraly) you can do to stop it taking place then why not get some good out of it .
,they are performing tests to assure the medicine does not cause more damage than it prevents , blocking funding to stem cell research does nobody any good , the pro lifers still get irate about abortions ,The religious folks who like to get irate with science and find another area of research to attack , the people suffering from parkensons lose some more hope ,The pro stem research lobbyist get a bit irate . all in all the situation is throughly iratating.
. .
,but he is very much right , its a no win situation unless you count votes for political fiqures a win , as thats the only thing to come out of this
2: if these abortions are going to hapen
The analogy you use of the FDA doing further research is specious
Im not an american and my views on Bushs other presidential acts otherwise aside , This was a totaly stupid decision that seems to me a bit like book burning
The research will continue , Your tax dollars are put to better use(?) are they , do you know what the funds got diverted to , i can hasten a guess that it is not back to you or another scientific field, Stem cell advances that will(possibly nothing is certain , but its fairly likely) save millions of lives will instead hapen much later and instead of being partial protected will be in the hands of a private company and it will end up costing you more in the end
The grandparent may have phrased it in a way that offended you slightly
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The cocktail of immuno-suppressive drugs (in some form or another) is something you pretty much take for life after an organ transplant.
I am a physician, and I've never heard of people being completely weaned from drugs. If they were, they would run the risk of their immune system reasserting itself big and ugly, possibly resulting in an episode of acute rejection (which is no joke). I can see them trying to taper the dose down a bit, but immunosuppressive therapy remains the standard of care.
If this is something new, I'd love to see it happen, because those drugs are very problematic for patients. They not only leave you susceptible to common infections, but they also increase your risk for cancers.
Never underestimate how many potential cancers your immune system finds and kills early. You should see some of the post-transplant patients who have spent time in the sun... they grow skin cancers like it's their job.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The limitation (passed during the Clinton years) is on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Insulin-producing cells from somebody's mother are not embryonic stem cells.
a te_in_the_U.S.
I happen to disagree with the ban myself, but it's still important to get one's facts straight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell#Policy_deb
I don't think anyone would become pregnant just so they could be harvested for cells. But if they did, what would be the harm? It's not "dead baby". It's a fetus. It might be only few clustered cells without any brain-functions. If those cells could be used to cure someone from a mortal disease, I fail to see what damage it does. Of course, abortion is a big thing for the people involved, but if they want to do it, who are we to say "no"?
Abortions will happen. Outlawing them wont make them go away. And since they will happen no matter what, you might as well figure out ways how they could benefit the society as a whole. Demonizing the doctors who do them as "baby-killers" or something accomplishes nothing. using the cells for cures of disease or research accomplishes quite alot.
If you really want to reduce the number of abortions, you should focus on educating people. No, "say no to sex!" or bible-thumbing is not the answer. Objective information about different birth-control methods and making them available would be a good start.
And like it or not, life is a commodity. It has been since the dawn of time. We have had prostitutes, slaves, mercenaries and even regural wage-slaves. We all sell our lives to some extent for money.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
My father has diebetes, and though immuno-depressing drugs do not sound so great, having his insulin level constantly in sync with his blood-sugar level should greatly help prevent diebetic complications (which are far worse than the daily dealings with the disease).
.
My father's daily routine is
1) measure his blood-sugar level (pricking the finger is the most accurate way to test)
2) injecting himself with the appropriate insulin amount.
However, there is a limit to how many times a day this can be done which results in stress to his system inbetween injections.
Though he is a type I diebetic, I certainly would not mind giving this treatment a shot even if his immune system would sabotage things in the end. I happen to live in Japan so it is not like I can complain about the treatment being too far from home . .
Where do I sign-up . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Since insulin is a relatively small polypeptide, wouldn't it be easier on the patient to grow the beta-cells on substrate inside microspheres with pores of about 50 nm? If you make the spheres out of non-organic material, immune cells will neither attack them or move into them.
/-o-\
ASCII art:
/ i \ i
/ \
| csc |
o csc io c = beta cells
| csc | s = substrate (serum proteins)
o csc o o = pore
\ / i = insulin
o / i
\_o_/
The insulin and glucose can traverse the pores, but immune cells can't reach the beta cells.
Just some wild speculation and it probably isn't even practical. I'm just a biochemist.
First of all: the cell transplant genie has been out of the bottle for about 5 years. Last mentioned success at King Hill hospital.
This is no way new.
2.: more important: the knock out here is the anti-immune-drugs. being treated with this means: live in a sterile environment, no carpet, no plants in your room etc, having any tooth fillings removed/teeth replaced with ceramics (drilled into the jaw. yes drilled) or a denture. And so on.
Plus, a simple cold hits you like a hammer.
So you pay your so called "health" with sacrifying a much larger portion of quality of life than the diabetes had an impact on.
Ok, what sucks about diabetes is having to take the injections
No. Trust me on this. What sucks about diabetes is the high likelyhood of losing your vision, pancreas, liver, feet, or even your dick.
A little jab in the stomache with a needle is nothing to fear compared to what high blood sugar does to your body over the long haul.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Dr. Denise Fastman has reversed diabetes in mice
She's trying to raise money for human trials, but has run into a few bumps
While this is good news and all, there still have not been studies for the long term use of immusupressents. Being diabetic for over 30 years I keep up with this type of information. Dr Faustman, was the first to cure diabetes in long term non-obese mice. Type 1 diabetes is an auto immune disease. What Dr. Faustman did was to stop the auto immune disease and retrain the immune system. After the treatment, the insulin cells reproduce themselves and no more medication of any kind was needed. It's a two step process. She's now trying to raise 11 million for the first phase 1 trial on humans with the help of Lee Iaccoca (of Chrysler fame). Unfortunately, her process uses drugs who's patent has expired and hence not a lot money potential on something that already costs the United States over 100 Billion. Lee Iaccoca who has already donated over 20 million on diabetes research is spearheading raising money for this by going to the people. You can find out more information and donate (I have) at http://http//www.joinleenow.org
Or if type 2. Taking stuff to keep your blood sugars level reasionable. Which that stuff usually affect the kidneys over times. And still run the risk of anything with small blood vessels having problems.
Sounds like. With this. You are changine one problem for another. Drugs that supress the amune system on rejection have there own nightmare.
Be nice for a total cure of this problem for both type 1 & 2.
Several -years- ago, the CBC's Quirks & Quarks
(science program) announced the successful
Edmonton Protocol (transplanting islets from
healthy volunteers to Type 1 Diabetes sufferers).
Trials were conducted around the world (incl'g
Canada, USA & Sweden, to name a few locations)
with success rates into the 80 & 90% ranges.
Of course, the problem seemed to be rejection of
the islets. necessitating the need to reduce the
immune system's effectiveness in the recipient.
So, WHAT'S NEW HERE?!?
Doesn't this article's poster or
read medical journals before embracing articles?
Fair enough to let people know about treatments
just in case peoples' doctors aren't telling them
about them (what doctors or insulin-pump makers
want to lose business?)
But is this
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Next article, please.
I believe it is the first living doner transplant. There have been successful cadever transplants before. Whole organ pancreas transplants havent lasted. Islet cell extractions inject into the blood or liver (like bone marrow transplants) have been more successful.