New findings published by Marc Hammerman and Sharon Rogers, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, bring hope to more than 200 million people worldwide who suffer from type 2 diabetes. Their research shows that the treatment used to cure type 1 diabetes, or juvenile diabetes, in rats may also be used to treat type 2 diabetes, commonly known as adult-onset diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes poses a significant threat because it is more than ten times as prevalent as type 1 diabetes, with the numbers increasing every year as more Americans are becoming obese.
The researchers used pancreatic primordia from pig embryos and transplanted them into rats that suffered from type 2 diabetes. These primordial cells grew into insulin-producing cells, without causing an autoimmune response from the body.
According to Hammerman, the findings are significant for a number of reasons. Hammerman said that while most diabetes treatments can control the fluctuations of blood glucose level with insulin or other oral drugs, the long-term complications from diabetes are uncertain and can lead to other serious health complications such as kidney failure, heart failure and other vascular diseases.
“In order to impact the long term complications, it is necessary to measure glucose level precisely, just as well as the pancreas,” said Hammerman.
Currently, there are two types of transplant options available. First, it is possible to transplant the human pancreas from a donor to a diabetic patient. This treatment, however, involves taking immune suppression drugs to prevent organ rejection by the recipient.
Additionally, there is also the problem of organ supply. With over 20 million diabetes patients, only a few thousand organs are available for transplant each year.
“In a way, they are trading one disease – diabetes – for another,” said Hammerman. “What we are trying to do is to develop new ways to treat diabetes that would not be limited by unavailability of donor organs and that might not require immune suppression drugs.”
Hammerman’s research allows for another option, which is to use animal organs for transplant surgeries. Hammerman said that pigs are the best source for a donor pancreatic tissue since their insulin closely resembles human insulin. Transplanting the pig tissue early in embryonic development would render the cells “invisible” to the rats’ immune systems, thus preventing rejection from the body.
Dr. Hammerman and his team had previously shown that they could transplant pancreatic primordial from a pig embryo to treat type 1 diabetes in rats. Hammerman said that they are in the next phase of the research, using non-human primates as test patients. He hopes to experiment on humans within five years.
Dr. Hammerman is a professor of renal diseases and senior author of the diabetes study recently published on the online version of Transplant Immunology.