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Scientists Coax Human Embryonic Stem Cells Into Making Insulin
First time accepted submitter kwiecmmm writes A group of Harvard scientists reported that they have figured out how to turn embryonic stem cells into beta cells capable of producing insulin. This discovery could cure diabetes. From the article: "'It's a huge landmark paper. I would say it's bigger than the discovery of insulin,' says Jose Olberholzer, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois. 'The discovery of insulin was important and certainly saved millions of people, but it just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life. The finding of Doug Melton would really allow to offer them really something what I would call a functional cure. You know, they really wouldn't feel anymore being diabetic if they got a transplant with those kind of cells.'"
Of course, when the problem you're facing is insulin resistance, this isn't going to help you all that much. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm still wondering how they intend to get around transplant rejection problems.
Now if they could convert adult stem cells into insulin factories, then that bit is obviated - you take the stem cells off of the patient him/herself, convert then, then put them into the pancreas...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Maybe read the article
Melton and others caution that there's still a lot more work to do. For one thing, they need to come up with a way to hide the cells from the immune system, especially for people with Type 1 diabetes. But they're working on that and have developed a shell to protect the cells.
"We're thinking about it as sort of like a teabag, where the tea stays inside, and the water goes in and then the dissolved tea comes out," Melton says. "And so, if you think about a teabag analogy, we would put our cells inside this teabag."
If they're made from someone else, the patient has to take immunosuppresive drugs. That sets them up for weird infections. If they're made from the patient's own cells, they'd still have to deal with the autoimmune response that destroyed the original beta cells in the first place (assuming type 1 diabetes).
that ancient sci-fi novel which has transplants (the old-school equivalent of stem cells) promoting the death penalty for all crimes, due to a need for parts.
There have also been examples when a procedure was first pioneered with embryonic stem cells, that later was able to be replicated with adult stem cells from the patient themselves. Initial attempts were probably made in part due to religious objections surrounding the use of embryos, but it has happened enough to consider that they might be able to do it here, with the patient's own cells, so there wouldn't be much of an issue with rejection.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Embryonic is easy mode, the cells can become literally any cell of the body.
Next you figure out what traits are absolutely necessary to make a cell produce insulin and compare it to the traits of pluripotent cells made from adult cells of various parts of the body. Maybe skin cells can be coaxed into it, or maybe muscle cells, or liver.
With this breakthrough they have a template that could quickly lead to diabetics being cured by a quick sample being cut out then reimplanted a month later after being changed into insulin producer cells.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
You can already pig out on ice cream if you don't already have diabetes. Contrary to popular mother's tales, eating a lot of sugar has never *caused* diabetes.
Being overweight doesn't cause it either, rather IF your body already has a certain amount of resistance to insulin, being overweight can exacerbate it. Inflammation and pregnancy can also do the same thing. (The later is called gestational diabetes.)
Congratulations to Melton and crew for this amazing discovery. The pessimist in me, though, says that this will never make it to market: Why would pharma companies want to make a once-off sale to diabetics that would cure them in 10 days when they can continue to milk money out of them by selling products and supplies that need to be used multiple times per day for life?
More or less came to say this. Except 'the diabeetus'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This story is really saying that this could cure juvenile diabetes -- it does not address adult-onset diabetes. Adult onset diabetes has a lot to do with insulin resistance in all of the cells in the body, and cannot get cured by simply pumping in more and more insulin.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Less of some types of carbs, yes, but more other stuff too: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... ...
"Excess weight interferes with insulin's functions, and is the primary risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes. Therefore the most effective treatment for type 2 diabetes is significant weight loss. However, the primary mode of treatment by physicians today is glucose-lowering medication. These medications give a false sense of security, providing implicit permission to continue the same disease-causing diet and lifestyle that allowed diabetes to develop in the first place. Many of these medications promote weight gain -- making the patient more diabetic; most importantly, these medications do not prevent diabetes from progressing and causing complications.
The key to diabetes reversal is superior nutrition and exercise. It may take a little extra effort, but avoiding the tragic complications of diabetes and a premature death is well worth it. My diabetes-reversal diet is vegetable-based with a high nutrient to calorie ratio, containing lots of greens and beans, other non-starchy vegetables, (such as mushrooms, eggplant, tomatoes and onions), raw nuts and seeds, and limited fresh fruit with no sweeteners or white flour products. When diabetics eat in this style, they lose their excess weight -- the cause of their diabetes -- quickly and easily, reducing or eliminating their need for medications and they also flood the body with disease-protective and healing micronutrients and phytochemicals that aid the body's recovery and self-repair mechanism."
For Type II diabetics, such a diet with weight loss brings the body's ability to respond to glucose in line with the remaining capacity to make it as needed. Exercise that builds more muscles and that is done when sugar is spiking can also help in managing glucose levels.
For Type I diabetics however, where the body can't produce much glucose at all if any, this improved diet/exercise is not enough, even if it can improve the situation some what as far as reducing complications. For Type I diabetics, this sort of breakthrough with stem cells, if it works, would be truly amazing.
Sometimes type I diabetics are really misdiagnosed type II, and vice versa, so there is a small level of confusion here where sometimes diet works when you would not expect etc..
BTW, vitamin D deficiency (from lack of natural sunlight) may be involved with the autoimmune response that could cause type I diabetes or perhaps make type II worse.
More from Furhman:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-...
More from others:
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
https://www.drmcdougall.com/he...
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/hea...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/0...
The deeper issue is that our brains and microbiomes are adapted for a scarcity of refined carbs, and we struggle with the abundance of cheap ones:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Furthermore, the statement by the bioethicist in the article is false:
"It's the destruction of an individual unique human life for the sole purpose of helping other persons."
I'm not sure why anyone would put it that way, since no one is out there having abortions for the purpose of supplying stem cells, and it is very nearly criminally irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
And if a pregnant woman elects to end her fetus's life wouldn't it be unethical not to use that tragedy to do some good for someone?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
says Jose Olberholzer, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois. 'The discovery of insulin was important and certainly saved millions of people, but it just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life. ...'
Sure, having to test yourself several times a day and shoot yourself at least daily isn't technically normal but people whose diabetes is under control with insulin and who are otherwise healthy can lead productive lives just like the rest of us.
If you want to talk about a medical treatment that " just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life" talk about the iron lung or something along those lines.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem is that Type 1 diabetes is from an auto-immune reaction.
Millions owe their lives to insulin. The genetically engineered human insulin is superior to both the bovine and pork insulins. Blood testing and self-injecting become habits that are easily integrated into your daily routine. The only real hassle is when you miscalculate how much insulin you need based on your food intake and ensuing energy output and your blood sugar goes too low.
So you wake up in an ambulance once in a blue moon because you passed out in public. It's a lot better than waking up missing toes, feet, legs etc from untreated or mismanaged diabetes.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The key to diabetes reversal is superior nutrition and exercise. It may take a little extra effort,
I just love phrases like this. "A little extra effort' indeed. Pretty much every diabetic patient gets counseled to lose weight. They get sent to dieticians. They get nagged at by their insurance company hot line. They don't lose weight.
Hence the drugs which do pretty much what you say they do and have some real, but hardly earthshattering, effect on the disease. If it were 'just' a matter of losing weight then we would 1) not be in the middle of an obesity and diabetes epidemic and 2) not having this conversation. But long term weight loss IS a big deal. So much so that the first person or persons to come up with a method that doesn't involve the usual suspects (changing one's diet and exercising more) gets booted into the top 0.1% instantly.
And yes, we have all seen the anecdotal stories of brave Slashdotters who have gone from next week's heart attack candidate to a lean macho machine by some combination of willpower, Doritos avoidance and free weights. But as we've all seen, the group of people that is the Slashdot community has little in common with the Rest of Them.
Weight loss is hard. Very hard. Especially in a population of random people.
And, BTW, Vitamin D is the current wonderthing. The vast majority of claims will undoubtedly be found to be spurious for reasons that we have amply documented in other threads.
but avoiding the tragic complications of diabetes and a premature death is well worth it.
We're doomed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
4Chan is thataway (points downward).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Umm, pretty much every diabetes study out there suggest otherwise - take your pick and do a search for "The rats/mice were fed sugar until they developed diabetes." Granted that's rodents rather than humans, but I've never heard anyone competent in the field suggest the same doesn't hold true for us. Now you can *also* inherit a predisposition to diabetes, in which case you may develop the disease even if you eat healthy your entire life, but pretty much anyone on a sufficiently sugar-rich diet is at risk of developing the condition - insulin resistance can also develop from prolonged exposure to elevated insulin levels.
Or in your context: pretty much everyone has *some* level of insulin resistance, our design isn't perfect after all. Exacerbate it hard enough and it becomes a problem, unless you're one of those lucky few who are graced with biochemical "immunity" on that front - hey, it happens. Some genetic freaks get horrible conditions, others are essentially immune to horrible things and may never even know it - medical science has only recently begun exploring the latter group.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'd say yes - yes it would. Fire insurance would cover it anyway.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
And in the case of the fetus who is the neighbour ?
The women aborting ?
Didn't she consent to the use of her fetus for scientifical purposes ?
So how could she be prejudiced ? Who else could be ?
...that before long, VHS cells will be developed and they'll kill off the Beta cells.
It's hard to anticipate much of value from somebody who manages to cram so many terms that are both heavily loaded and almost totally vacuous into a single sentence.
In addition to your point (it's very, very, unlikely that the embryos were produced for this purpose at all, let alone solely, since most of the embryo supply is surplus from IVF work, which humans obviously do for other reasons), the rest of the sentence is little more than a fabric of implicit assertions padded with a few nearly meaningless bits.
"Destruction": This process only works because the embryonic cells are undifferentiated (any later in embryonic development and it'd be fun with cell reprogramming) and will only be medically relevant if the resulting beta cells form a reasonably long lived cell line(possibly not immortal; but the more frequently the patient needs new ones implanted, the lower the benefit over just injecting insulin). Does this change in developmental trajectory count as 'destruction'? Arguable; but hardly self-evident.
"Individual": As opposed to the other kind? Did I miss all those collective humans out there? Maybe a hive mind? What would a 'non-individual' human life even look like?
"Unique": Both irrelevant (would the procedure be somehow more or less ethical if it were non-unique? One of those creepy, soulless, clones?) and questionably accurate (very early stage embryos can, and sometimes do, split and form two cell masses that each continue to divide. We call them 'identical twins' and usually don't tell them that they are non-unique, or that a 'unique human life' was destroyed when the original zygote split into two). Given the age of the cells the researchers were working with, chosen specifically for their plasticity, it's actually somewhat tricky to argue that the embryo is 'individual' and 'unique'. In a terribly vacuous sense it is (this embryo is unique because no other embryo is also this embryo); but beyond that you really have to argue for it.
"Human life": This one is as old as the hills, and a classic of the abortion wars. Is it human? Yeah, sure, to the same degree that any other cells in my body are. Is it a 'human life' in the moral personhood sense that you are invoking? Arguable; but you certainly haven't argued it yet.
I sure hope that this bioethicist was either taken out of context or hasn't given up the day job.
Honestly, the hardest thing about subverting free will is actually chasing down a demonstrable instance of it to subvert.
The business of modifying people's behaviors and decisions, on the other hand, at least at the "all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time" population level is absolutely ubiquitous, rather effective, and at least as old as civilization.
Abort that fetus today, you could save a diabetic person's foot...
They may have other uses; but fetuses old enough to abort are not a good supply of embryonic stem cells (all those adorably baby-like features you see on the gory antiabortion posters? That's because the cells have already differentiated and lost most of the really cool capabilities of early stage embryonic cells...)
If you want to do your part for the stem cell industrial complex, get some IVF done.
All the Vatican knows is that it involves stem cells, so they're agin it.
Sorry dude. Hate to break it to you but the answer is neither. You have to shove it up your dick hole to get it back into your balls where it came from. Good luck with that!
....aaaaand it'll be gone.
(for "bioethics zealots" read: "GSK shills")
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The other question I have is, is this really a cure? It sounds more like a 'permanent treatment' for the individual (which is a good thing). Genetically they still carry the gene that could pass down diabetes to the next generation.
I wonder if the next (or even real) step to proclaiming a cure to a hereditary disease like diabetes is being able to change a person's DNA so that they no longer have the disease and can't pass it on to their descendents.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There's been a few things made from adult stem cells. This may end up being one of them after a bit more work, so that then cells from the intended recipient can be taken, altered, grown and transplanted. Then it's functionally like a skin graft.
The only way it could be compared to stem cells is if, with permission, you cannibalized what was left of an unrepairable TV to build or repair life-saving technology. Doesn't sound so slippery anymore, does it?
Maybe read the article
Melton and others caution that there's still a lot more work to do. For one thing, they need to come up with a way to hide the cells from the immune system, especially for people with Type 1 diabetes. But they're working on that and have developed a shell to protect the cells.
"We're thinking about it as sort of like a teabag, where the tea stays inside, and the water goes in and then the dissolved tea comes out," Melton says. "And so, if you think about a teabag analogy, we would put our cells inside this teabag."
Immune system response is a major concern in Type 1 diabetes, because it is auto-immune disease. Restoring B cells only so that they could be ravaged yet another time won't do much good in the long run. On the other hand, if they can solve that problem and protect the cells, perhaps there could be a procedure to extract living tissue under immune attack, preserve it and re-implant it back, thus stopping the disease from developing further. And if that technology works, maybe it could be applied to other auto immune disorders of endocrine glands, such as e.g. Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
Because, how much easier does it get than lifting stuff from a dead guy?
Price, as you mentin, is an important factor, of course, but taking out just the insuling producing cells from a pancreas isn't extremely easy, as they are embedded in other tissue (from Wikipedia):
The part of the pancreas with endocrine function is made up of approximately a million[7] cell clusters called islets of Langerhans. Four main cell types exist in the islets. They are relatively difficult to distinguish using standard staining techniques, but they can be classified by their secretion: α alpha cells secrete glucagon (increase glucose in blood), Î beta cells secrete insulin (decrease glucose in blood), Î" delta cells secrete somatostatin (regulates/stops α and Î cells) and PP cells, or Î (gamma) cells, secrete pancreatic polypeptide.[8]
The islets are themselves not necessarily easy to transplant, as one would have re-establish the necessary blood supply for each, I suspect; and distinguishing - let alone separating - the four main cell types is probably not trivial either.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever.
This meshes with my own observations when I switched to a low-carb diet. I found that I'd eat and still "feel" hungry. The low-carb solution is to just allow yourself to eat more in this case, but to still stay away from the carbs. Your brain then learns that cramming more food in your mouth no longer produces the sensations it is looking for, and it becomes easier to not eat so much. I felt a bit like a rat in a Skinner box pushing the button and not getting any food, and just like the rat in the Skinner box I eventually stopped pushing the button so much.
The change in tastes definitely happened. In the beginning I would make myself low-carb treats and think they were tasteless. Then after many months I actually had an ice cream sundae and thought that it almost tasted sickeningly sweet. I don't really make myself low carb treats all that much these days, but when I do I often just stick with erythritol and don't even bother with adding more sweetener, which should resulting in something maybe half as sweet as a normal treat.
Joint replacements are typically for a decade or two - a common failure mode is the vast number of tiny bits of bone that get ground off when the metal scrapes them off get attacked by the immune system and then it starts eating into the bone where the joint is anchored, eventually leading to it being too weak and replacement is needed on fresh bone, requiring a larger joint. Similarly getting a decade or two out of beta cells is still a pretty big deal. It doesn't have to last fifty or seventy years per operation to be useful.
Because, how much easier does it get than lifting stuff from a dead guy?
They specifically mention treating "a large number of patients". Even if extraction was simple, and
ignoring getting permission from next of kin, there is not a large enough supply of transplant quality
cadavers for the number of people with diabetes. Also, doing anything with the pancreas is extremely
time sensitive because it starts digesting itself pretty much as soon as a person is dead.
I thought one of the problems with diabetes was not having the _right_ amount of insulin, corresponding to the levels of blood sugar?
I've seen the effects of too much insulin, and it ain't pretty. (It's called hypoglycemia, folks.) So just stuffing a bunch of insulin producer cells in a person's system is not going to be the solution.
Presumably a healthy pancreas can regulate the amount of insulin, not just produce it blindly which perhaps could lead to what you describe happening. There's more to the pancreas than just insulin production and presumably diabetics still have some pancreatic functionality, what will it do when it sees some upstart cells usurping its role ?
Nullius in verba
The pancreas in type 1 diabetics doesn't "react" negatively to the presence of insulin injected by the patient. But go without it for too long, you die. So the problem is, the same process that destroyed the insulin-producing cells in my body will probably destroy any implanted ones as well. And even if it doesn't, I have no wish to take immune-suppressing drugs - that would be a case of the cure being worse than the current treatment.
Comparing that to mice that had their ability to produce insulin artificially destroyed ... it doesn't compute.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I don't think that analogies to non-life circumstances really work in this argument. I would think it's better to compare this to organ transplantation. In the United States it's against the law to sell organs. It's against the law to take organs from those sentenced to death without their consent, and even with their consent it's difficult to go about it. There have been examples when tissues were taken and profited from such as those taken from Henrietta Lacks, but we've as a society attempted to take profit motive out of this kind of contribution.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that women will get pregnant specifically for the possibility of selling their abortions for medical research. I also find it exceedingly unlikely that women will choose to be less-safe with their sexual intercourse because a secondary byproduct could be a little bit of profit from such a sale. I'll concede that it's not impossible for this to happen though, as there are urban myths about people selling organs or tissues from themselves for-profit. I find it more likely that if there's any revenue for the patient by the sale of aborted fetal tissue, it'll only really be enough to offset the costs of the abortion procedure itself and given storage, transportation, and maintenance costs won't be a profitable enterprise for any party other than the one doing the research and ultimately profiting off of the results of that research.
The only real grey area that I see are IVF-embryos on-ice that were created for couples and never used and never will be used, and how disposal of those embryos will happen. I assume that the IVF-related costs have already been paid, and that the couple is now only outlaying money for the safe storage of embryos. They might be able to sell those embryos, but given that IVF-patients are unlikely to make such a decision until long after they're past the desire to have more children, it'll be a loss-mitigating circumstance rather than a profit-making one.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
False a more direct parallel would be, If your neighbor's house catches on fire when he's not home, would it be OK to go over to his house and taked the burned, unworkable and unviable remains of his television and use them to save a human life?
Umm, pretty much every diabetes study out there suggest otherwise - take your pick and do a search for "The rats/mice were fed sugar until they developed diabetes."
I just did something a lot more to the point:
https://www.google.com/#safe=o...
As you can see, the answer to the question in my search varies from either a resounding no (diabetes.org outright says its a myth) to being exactly in-line with my own previous commentary.
There seems to be one major difference between this situation and your analogy:
In the case of the neighbor and the TV, the neighbor is a moral person with an interest in his TV (and even if he is dead, his 'estate' has an interest in it, and even if the TV is going to be destroyed, it is likely to have insurance coverage that he won't get if you salvage it and it isn't destroyed after all). It quite likely would be ethical for you to help him out by saving some stuff from the fire; but you'd be a total dick to save some stuff from the fire, then tell him 'haha, no, mine now!' rather than "Here, I got these out for you."
In this case, your 'neightbor' only exists if you treat the possible-future-child (that might have been produced from the embryo, if somebody was found who wanted to use it, most IVF surplus just stays on ice until it eventually gets tossed, since people tend to want either their own children, or go with adoptions of already-born children) as a moral person. This is a position that some take, and arguably a cogent one; but it's far from immediately proven.
If you don't consider the embryo to be a moral person(at least not this early in development, if it was chosen for cellular plasticity it probably doesn't even have a neural network yet), then there is no 'neighbor' analog to speak of. Simply an item of value that can either be used or be allowed to be destroyed.