- A woman has undergone a stem-cell therapy made from her own cells, to treat her type 1 diabetes.
- Researchers in China discovered the woman did not need to use insulin 75 days after the procedure, and that the stem-cell derived islet cells she was injected with had been engrafted inside her abdomen.
- More people have been enrolled in this trial and other stem-cell therapy trials at several sites around the world.
A woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than 3 months after receiving an injection of a stem-cell derived treatment. She remained free from insulin injections 1 year after treatment.
The case is the first of its kind, and two more people have been enrolled in the clinical trial in China since, researchers involved in the study told Medical News Today.
Hongkui Deng, PhD, lead author of the new study — which appears in
“The trial is ongoing and includes three patients in total. After [an] interim analysis of the [data of the] first patient and the submission of this work, the second and third patients were enrolled. Follow-up with these patients is ongoing, as they were sequentially enrolled in accordance with regulatory safety requirements. [A] long-term follow-up of at least 2 years will be conducted.”
Other stem-cell based therapies for type 1 and type 2 diabetes are also currently in development and in trials.
For this case study, researchers based in Tianjin First Central Hospital, Nankai University, Tianjin, China took fat cells from a 25 year-old woman with type 1 diabetes, and chemically induced them to behave as pluripotent stem cells, a type of cell that can develop into other types of cell.
They then used these to create islet cells, which typically exist in the pancreas and create insulin, a hormone that regulates levels of glucose (sugar) in the…
Read the full article here
