Word: typing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...These cells represent the newest model of diabetes for humans," says Melton. "We have a lot of good models of Type 1 diabetes in the mouse, but everything that we have learned from them has failed in the clinic. Now we have a chance at figuring out how humans get the disease...
...experiment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provided the first good model - in a petri dish - of how Type 1 diabetes develops, giving scientists a peek at what goes wrong in patients affected by the disease. Such knowledge could lead to not only new stem-cell-based treatments, but also novel drug therapies that might improve the symptoms of the disease. (Read "Study: Stem Cells May Reverse Type 1 Diabetes...
Douglas Melton, co-director of HSCI, and his team took skin cells from two Type 1 diabetes patients, exposed the cells to a cocktail of three genes that converted them back to an embryonic state - which are referred to as pluripotent stem cells - then instructed the newly reborn cells to grow into beta cells, the cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin. In Type 1 diabetes, these beta cells no longer work to break down the glucose that floods the body after each meal, leading to blood-sugar spikes that can damage the kidneys and heart...
Diabetes researchers believe that the disorder is caused by some type of immune reaction gone awry - immune cells are "trained" in the thymus gland to recognize the body's own cells and protect them from destruction. For some reason, this education doesn't occur properly in Type 1 diabetes patients, and the immune system sees the pancreatic beta cells as foreign. Melton's team is currently working to generate thymus cells from diabetic patients in the same way the team created the beta cells, in order to put all the players together in a lab dish, in a kind...
...these methods of making beta cells become more established, says Dr. Rohit Kulkarni, a diabetes expert at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, the strategy could be expanded to help patients with either Type 1 or 2 diabetes. "It might even be more relevant for other types of diabetes where there is no immune-system attack," he says. In those cases, simply replacing nonfunctioning beta cells might go a long way toward treating or even curing the disease. (See how to prevent illness...