I learned this morning that there has been some new, optimistic research done on the long-sought “cure” for Type 1 diabetes. One of the difficulties in reversing type 1 is that there is an autoimmune destruction of pancreatic islet β cells, so even if new ones could be stimulated to grow they’d be attacked by the body and soon destroyed. Using cord-blood stem cells, however, a recent clinical trial (apparently a joint China/US venture) has demonstrated that this autoimmunity can evidently be reversed for some time.
One of the highlights (for me, anyway) of the article was this sentence:
“Due to the limitation of obtaining pancreatic tissues from human subjects, evidence from our trial indicates that β cell regeneration occurs even in patients who do not appear to have β cells prior to treatment.”
Wow! Great news for a Sunday morning.
Here’s a link to the initial .pdf: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1741-7015-10-3.pdf