Researchers report they were able to restore normal blood sugar levels for six months in mice with induced diabetes.
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But, while the research is promising, it's too soon for people with type 1 diabetes to start planning a life free of needles and injections just yet, experts said.
The first part of the treatment was using insulin-producing pancreas cells generated from human stem cells employing a technique recently developed at Harvard.
But the latest breakthrough came from MIT researchers, who developed a way to encapsulate the cells - called islet cells - before they were implanted in the mice, to protect them from the immune system.
That's key for two reasons. One is that when you introduce foreign cells into the body, the immune system recognizes them as foreign and destroys them. This is why people who have organ transplants need to take immune-suppressing medications, which can cause serious side effects.
The second reason is that type 1 diabetes develops when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy islet cells and destroys them - known as an autoimmune attack.
When people have had islet cell transplant, the new cells eventually die off, and researchers suspect one reason why is that the autoimmune attack doesn't stop.
However, the encapsulation hides the islet cells, essentially making them invisible to the immune system, the researchers explained.
"They're stealth islets. We're really excited about this. It's been a long and big effort for us to try to drive novel biomaterials," said Julia Greenstein, vice president of discovery research for JDRF, a type 1 diabetes research foundation that provided funding for the study along with the Helmsley Charitable Trust and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
There are still a number of steps before a human trial could be done, such as scaling up the capsules for larger animals, and seeing whether or not the encapsulated islet cells can achieve blood sugar control in non-human primates, Greenstein said. ■