“We wanted to replace insulin injections” with “nature’s own solution,” says Melton, who has been a leading scientist in and advocate for the field of stem-cell biology ever since he switched from studying developmental biology in frogs after his young son, and later his daughter, were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
He is now co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and co-chair of the Harvard department of stem cell and regenerative biology (in the Faculties of Medicine and of Arts and Sciences).
What Melton reports in the journal Cell on October 9 is that his lab, including co-first authors Felicia W. Pagliuca, Jeff Millman, and Mads Gurtler (as well as a Harvard undergraduate and others), have succeeded in developing a procedure for making hundreds of millions of pancreatic beta cells in vitro. These cells, Melton explains, “read the amount of sugar in the blood, and then secrete just the right amount insulin in a way that is so exquisitely accurate that I don’t believe it will ever be reproduced by people injecting insulin or by a pump injecting that insulin.”
The cells share key traits and markers characteristic of beta cells with those from healthy individuals, including the packaging of the insulin they secrete in granules. In diabetic mice, they cure diabetes right away, in fewer than 10 days, Melton reports.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/10/melt ... beta-cells
The sooner the better for this treatment.
