Scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have found a way for people with type 1 diabetes to potentially be able to improve their wellbeing by regenerating their own insulin-producing cells, thanks to the identification of stem cells in the adult pancreas that can be turned into insulin producing cells. This provides further evidence that stem cells don’t only occur in the embryo.
You need to be able to produce insulin in order to control your blood sugar or glucose levels, but if you have type 1 diabetes, your immune system destroys the beta cells of the pancreas that are responsible for producing insulin, and this leads to your blood glucose levels rising to wellness-damaging and potentially fatal levels. Therefore, if you have type 1 diabetes it is likely that you rely on multiple daily injections of insulin, or an insulin infusion pump, to control your blood glucose. However, if this is the case you know that the control is not perfect and you are still at risk of serious long-term health complications.
Yet Dr Ilia Banakh and Professor Len Harrison of the institute’s Molecular Medicine division have developed a technique to drive these identified stem cells to become insulin-producing cells that can secrete insulin in response to glucose. According to Harrison, ‘what Dr Banakh has done is pinpoint the cell of origin of the insulin-producing cells and shown that the number of these cells and their ability to turn into insulin-producing cells increases in response to pancreas injury. This is exciting, because it means that the potential to regenerate insulin-producing cells is there in all of us, even as adults’.
Harrison, who is a clinician scientist whose research led to current clinical trials that could prevent type 1 diabetes, continued, ‘In the long-term, we hope that people with type 1 diabetes might be able to regenerate their own insulin-producing cells. This would mean that they could make their own insulin and regain control of their blood glucose levels, curing their diabetes. Of course, this strategy will only work if we can devise ways to overcome the immune attack on the insulin-producing cells that causes diabetes in the first place’.
In November, was given the Outstanding Contribution to Diabetes Award by Diabetes Australia, in recognition of his achievements.
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