Cell Transplant May Offer Hope for Diabetics
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
LONDON — Thousands of diabetics will be given hope of a cure as a ground-breaking transplant program is set to be rolled out across Britain, the Daily Telegraph has learned. Clinical trials of an injection of insulin creating cells taken from a donor have been so successful ministers have agreed to fund a $15 million national program to offer it more widely.
More than a dozen patients with unstable Type 1 diabetes have undergone transplants of pancreas cells, and some have been completely “cured” of the condition and no longer need to take insulin. Others have improved so much they no longer have life-threatening seizures where their blood sugar crashes and they can fall into a coma and die.
Type 1 diabetes can be caused by an infection or a defect in the immune system that causes the body to destroy its own insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, and sufferers must inject themselves with the hormone daily. It is different from Type 2 diabetes, which is mostly triggered by obesity and can often be controlled with diet. Up to one in four people with Type 1 diabetes have few or no symptoms before an imminent attack, meaning they cannot take action to prevent it. There are around 2,000 patients with this so-called unstable diabetes.
Paul Johnson, the director of the Oxford islet transplant program, based at the Churchill Hospital and Oxford University, said: “The funding from the Department of Health is excellent news for people with life-threatening diabetes.”
The teams at Oxford, King’s College Hospital, and the Royal Free Hospital in London, will isolate and harvest the cells from the donor organs and along with centers in Manchester, Newcastle, and Bristol, will offer the transplants to around 20 patients in the first year and more after that.
The cells — known as islet cells — are taken from the pancreas of a dead organ donor and grown in the laboratory for two days. More than 300,000 cells are needed for a successful transplant and patients can have up to two transplants. The cells are injected into the liver where they start to produce insulin.
The only other option for many for these patients is a transplant of the whole pancreas, but complications can be life-threatening.
