Your wellbeing is at risk of developing Type 1 and type 2 diabetes when the beta cells in your pancreas cannot produce enough insulin, your blood sugar-regulating hormone. Therefore, one way to tackle diabetes and improve your wellness is to stimulate the regeneration of new endocrine cells, which are cell types, such as beta cells, that secrete hormones, from the stem cells of human embryos. At the moment, this can be done either by generating the cells in vitro in culture or transplanting immature endocrine cell precursors into mice.
Yet Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, collaborating with scientists from San Diego-based biotech company ViaCyte, Inc., have been studying the differences and similarities between these two types of human embryonic stem cell-, or hESC-derived endocrine cell populations and primary human endocrine cells. They published their findings online in the journal Cell Stem Cell, and hope that the results of their study will lead to the development of new stem cell therapies for diabetes.
According to principal investigator Maike Sander, MD, professor of paediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine, and director of UC San Diego’s Paediatric Diabetes Research Centre, ‘We found that the endocrine cells retrieved from transplanted mice are remarkably similar to primary human endocrine cells’. He explained, ‘This shows that hESCs can differentiate into endocrine cells that are almost indistinguishable from their primary human counterparts.’
Yet these cells are not able to reverse diabetes in diabetic animal models, because when the endocrine cells were produced in vitro, they lacked certain necessary features of primary endocrine cells and were not able to express the majority of genes that are vital for endocrine cell function. However, this study does provide hints about the steps currently missing in in-vitro differentiation protocols.
Sander said that they could try transplanting the endocrine precursor cells into humans and let the cells mature in the patient as they do in mice, but ‘we don’t currently know whether the maturation process will occur in humans in the same way’ and so further research is needed in this area. In the meantime, she said that an alternative approach could be to generate fully functional endocrine cells in the culture dish and to then transplant these cells into humans.
She concluded by saying ‘This information will help devise protocols to generate functional insulin-producing beta cells in vitro. This will be important not only for cell therapies, but also for identifying disease mechanisms that underlie the pathogenesis of diabetes.’
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