A new technique developed over the last decade can take skin cells, or any other cells of the body, and make them into something new. This process holds promise for the damaged pancreas of people with diabetes.
Any islets transplanted into the T1 body must run a gauntlet of killer T cells to survive long enough to integrate into the body. Most don’t live that long; some 90% of islets die either during transplant or shortly thereafter, making islet therapy often an expensive T1 therapy of last resort.
As co-director of the Clinical Islet Transplant Program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Dr. Stock is one of the scientists on the frontline of trying to make islet therapy a viable. “We’ve been saying islet therapy is ‘right around the corner’ for quite awhile, but now it really seems to be true,” […]
As the JDRF’s national director of research investment opportunities, Tom’s one of the most sought-after speakers at the moment because he’s able to not only give an overview of the latest exciting D-tech, but also share his own personal experiences as one of the first people ever to wear an Artificial Pancreas system over a […]
As someone who’s been doing islet cell transplants for 20-plus years now, Dr. Jose Oberholzer in Chicago wonders why more people with diabetes don’t know about the procedure as an option.
Preparing for human clinical trials, the research pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of UPMC of Pittsburgh needs $7 million to $10 million for a multi-site trial involving 105 people with a recent diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. But federal budget cuts are making it difficult to land research grants through the National Institutes of Health.
The device, which is currently dubbed “a self-regulating insulin delivery device,” would be implanted in the abdomen. The outside of the device would be made of plastic or metal and there would be no electronic or moving parts.
ViaCyte’s VC-01 product candidate is a cell replacement therapy that could transform the way individuals with type 1 diabetes manage their disease by supplying an alternative source of insulin-producing cells with the potential to free individuals from a dependence on external insulin use.
Researchers in California report that they have reversed the equivalent of type 1 diabetes in mice through transplants of stem cells. Their experiments have replaced cells in the pancreas damaged by the disease that are unable to make insulin.
The device is being developed by Ed Damiano, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, and Dr. Steven Russell, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Pancreas transplants for patients such as Schofield are not typically an option because they are difficult to perform, said Dr. Michael Rickels, associate professor of medicine at University of Pennsylvania. But an experimental procedure using the pancreas’ islet cells is being tested at medical centers around the country. If it’s approved by the Food and […]
A study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides further demonstration that implanting encapsulated beta cells can be beneficial to individuals with T1D. In the study, researchers implanted functional islet cells from the pancreas of a deceased organ donor into a 63-year-old man who had had T1D for 54 years and […]
The device includes an insulin pump and a glucose sensor that stops insulin delivery when blood glucose reaches a preset level. The system has been approved for use by diabetics aged 16 years and older. Medtronic said it would conduct a post-approval study that would include children aged 2 years and older.
The latest approach to islet transplantation, in which clusters of insulin-producing cells known as islets are transplanted from a donor pancreas into another person’s liver, has produced substantially improved results for patients with type 1 diabetes, and may offer a more durable alternative to a whole pancreas transplant.
The longest and largest study of the effectiveness of insulin pumps to treat type 1 diabetes in children has shown that the pumps are more effective at controlling blood sugar than insulin injections and cause fewer complications. The research is published in Diabetologia.
Smartphones have gotten good enough to provide nearly continuous, closed-loop, outpatient control of blood sugar in people with diabetes, according to a recently published study
The Bionic Pancreas is coming soon. It’s the development of a drug delivery device that responds to glucose concentrations to automatically avoid both high and low blood glucose, a so-called artificial endocrine pancreas, has been a long-term goal of diabetes therapy.
Scott Scolnick is a sales territory manger for Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc. the insulin pump company which makes the tslim insulin pump. Despite the M.D.’s grim prognosis, he has survived that hurdle and now uses an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to control his blood glucose levels.
Could a “bionic pancreas”-a combination of insulin pump, continuous glucose monitor and predictive software-be on the market within four years? That 2017 date is the ambitious goal of a project from researchers at Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Insulin pump maker Animas has taken another step toward perfecting (and hopefully putting on sale) the first artificial pancreas. The company doesn’t call it anything that clear-cut, instead referring to the device as “a closed-loop insulin delivery system.”