First patient cured of type 1 diabetes

A very promising clinical trial.

The future where people suffering from type 1 diabetes can get rid of daily insulin injections and lead a normal life again seems to be closer to becoming a reality, one patient has been functionally cured of the disease and has now been free for more than a year. need doses of insulin and all this thanks to an innovative treatment that involves stem cells.

Type 1 diabetes is a devastating autoimmune disease, where the immune system attacks the cells of the pancreas responsible for producing insulin, without insulin the body cannot control blood glucose levels and patients need daily injections to survive, but what about If it were possible to replace those lost cells, that is exactly the idea behind a phase one clinical trial that has just produced impressive and most interesting results.

And the most interesting thing is that the new cells that produce insulin were grown from the patient's own stem cells. The patient, a 25-year-old woman, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was only 14 years old. Since then, her life has been marked by insulin dependency as well as serious complications that led her to undergo two liver transplants and one pancreas transplant, but now everything has changed.

Test procedure.

In the treatment, the scientists isolated stem cells from their adipose tissue, which were reprogrammed to a previous state of development, this allowed these cells to differentiate into pancreatic islet cells, the same cells responsible for the production of insulin in the body, these cells. They were grown in the laboratory and then transplanted into the patient's abdominal muscles.

Two weeks after the transplant the patient's daily insulin needs began to decrease, by day 75 she was completely insulin-free and has remained so for an entire year, during this time more than 98% of her blood glucose levels They were within the Healthy Range and best of all without any abnormalities related to the transplant.

Importantly, this approach presents some innovations compared to previous studies, the stem cells were induced chemically rather than genetically and were extracted from a different source in the body, however, there is still a challenge for the immune system to face. patient needs to continue to be suppressed since this solution does not directly attack the root cause of type 1 diabetes which is the autoimmune attack but immune suppression is already a common procedure in many transplants.

This clinical trial opens a new horizon in the treatment of type 1 diabetes, although more studies are needed. The possibility of reversing this disease that has affected millions of people for so long has never been so close, currently two other participants are already enrolled. in this trial and future results could confirm whether this is the long-awaited definitive functional cure for type 1 diabetes.