New Hope for Diabetics

People withdiabetesType 1 is caused by a lack of beta cells in the endocrine pancreas, which is responsible for producing insulin. To monitor and control blood sugar levels, patients must regularly test and inject additional insulin, which is very inconvenient and has a high risk.

Scientists have found a new direction in treating diabetes - Photo:Gizmag

Therefore, scientists at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco (USA) have researched how to turn skin cells into beta cells that supply the endocrine pancreas to produce insulin.

One of the difficulties is that when the endocrine pancreas is weakened, it will limit the regeneration of beta cells. Professor Sheng Ding at the Gladstone Institute has taken the direction of exploiting stem cell technology to convert skin cells into beta cells that secrete endogenous insulin.

The team started with skin cells called fibroblasts, which were collected from laboratory mice. By treating them with a cocktail of molecules and reprogramming factors, the fibroblasts transformed into cells resembling endoderm cells, which are present in the very early embryo and eventually turn into major internal organs, including the pancreas.

Gizmag magazine quoted Dr. Scholar Ke Li as saying that the endodermal cells transformed into pancreatic cells and called PPLCs, which matured like beta cells that help the pancreas secrete insulin.

Some mice in the experiment were genetically modified to have a sudden increase in blood sugar and then had PPLC implanted into their bodies. After a week, their blood sugar levels gradually returned to normal.

In longer-term testing, after eight weeks of PPLC transplantation, scientists noted a marked increase in functional cells that help increase insulin secretion.

Gizmag quoted Dr. Matthias Hebrok, a member of the research team and director of a diabetes center, saying that this technology can be applied to humans to create a new method of treating type 1 diabetes.

According to Thanhnien