In a major breakthrough, Chinese scientists found a clinical cure for type 1 diabetes after carrying out a world-first procedure to transplant islet cells in a female patient that reverses the major disease.
She was injected with stem cells harvested from her own body, according to clinical research published on Wednesday in the journal Cell, which also quoted the procedure of the Chinese doctors as a possible clinical cure for type 1 diabetes.
The first of its kind, stem cell therapy, was performed by medical scientists from Tianjin First Central Hospital, Peking University, Changping Laboratory and Hangzhou Reprogenix Bioscience.
Type 1 diabetes is one of the more severe forms of the major disease in which some people’s own immune system starts attacking their pancreas, as early as their childhood, damaging the islet cells responsible for making insulin.
Until now, any long-term cure for the condition has been via transplantation of a pancreas, and in the short term most type-1 diabetes patients rely on insulin injections to control blood sugar.
Emerging studies over the last decade have pointed to a potential cure using stem cells, which have the special ability to grow and differentiate into different types of cells, Independent UK reported.
Scientists previously developed a breakthrough procedure in which a type of stem cell, which can be nurtured and grown into any tissue, is used to replace tissues in the body.
The new medical trial, described in the journal last week, involved first extracting cells from a 25-year-old female patient from Tianjin, China, and reverting them to their unspecialised state.
The patient, who had type 1 diabetes for 11 years, was completely dependent on insulin treatment and suffered from poor blood sugar control.
After the transplant of islet cells derived from chemically induced pluripotent stem cells (CiPSC-islets), she regained the capability to autonomously regulate her blood sugar.
“Traditional islet transplant therapy can alleviate these problems,” Wang Shusen from Tianjin First Central Hospital, one of the corresponding authors of the paper, was quoted by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Shusen added that the therapy has shown clear progress as an alternative treatment strategy, but a shortage of pancreas donors means its application is limited.
Seventy-five days after the transplant, she became insulin independent and has remained insulin injection-free for over a year. All her diabetes-related indicators have reached the levels of a healthy person, confirming the clinical cure of this type 1 diabetes patient, the report added.
The researchers said that the procedure “restored glycemic control” in the patient, functionally reversing her type-1 diabetes over a year. They added that there was “no indication of transplant-related abnormalities.”
However, the patient had to be monitored for a long duration to validate the effectiveness of the method, the researchers cautioned. They added that the patient was already receiving drugs to suppress her immunity due to a prior liver transplant.
The scientists also called for further clinical studies assessing the benefits of stem cell transplantation in reversing type 1 diabetes.
