A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.
“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjing, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”
It’s worth noting that a major caveat to this result pointed out in this article is that the woman is presently on immunosuppressants from a liver transplant, thus we don’t yet know the risks that the body’s immune system could just, after the transplant, do the same thing that causes T1D in the first place, which is attack and destroy the islets in the pancreas which produce insulin.
Still an absolutely fascinating result, and hopefully more data over the coming years gives us a better understanding of how this works over the long term.
Sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made for finding ways to ensure that your body does not attack the stem cells that are generated from your own body.
Those two therapies combined would be a trillion dollar combination therapy for the company that can make it work.
I wonder if the process they use to make the covid shots could help?
The tricky part about T1 is… We don’t know why the immune system is malfunctioning, only that it is. Without that vital piece of research, everything that presents as a cure is temporary at best.
Dr. Faustman out of Mass General has been conducting some trials into phase two or three using the BCG vaccine to treat / cure the immune response.