Stem cell discovery by team in London, Ontario opens exciting new line of biomedical research.
Imagine a news bulletin, perhaps in the year 2012, which describes a cure for people with Type 1 diabetes, involving a fairly simple transplant procedure that will regenerate pancreatic tissue, raise blood insulin to normal levels and restore control of blood sugar without insulin injections.
Far-fetched? Medical fiction? An unachievable pipe-dream?
Perhaps that exciting prospect now looks less like science fiction with the remarkable advance due to be reported in the forthcoming July 2003 issue of the life science magazine Nature Biotechnology.
Dr Mickie Bhatia and colleagues working in London, Ontario, Canada describe how stem cells can cure a diabetes-like disease in hyperglycaemic mice that had no pancreatic insulin until after they had been treated with stem cells. After adult, bone-marrow derived stem cells had been transplanted into these mice, their insulin levels increased to near-normal levels and their blood sugar decreased quite significantly.
This scientific breakthrough is quite different from other important and very significant research trials already taking place elsewhere in Canada, to transplant insulin-producing islet cells into the liver of people with Type 1 diabetes.
What was particularly intriguing, when Mickie Bhatia’s research team investigated further, they discovered that while transplanted stem cells did not produce insulin themselves they did stimulate regeneration of the animals’ own pancreatic cells.
What is more, the regeneration took place within the insulin producing tissues of the pancreas, which had not been present before the procedure.
As the authors report in the advance online version of the Nature Biotechnolgy magazine: "Although quantitative analysis of the pancreas revealed a low frequency of donor insulin-positive cells, these cells were not present at the onset of blood glucose reduction. Instead, the majority of transplanted cells were localized to ductal and islet structures, and their presence was accompanied by a proliferation of recipient pancreatic cells that resulted in insulin production."
They are understandably cautious about the future prospects: "While the approach shows promise, it has not yet been studied in humans, and further research will be needed before it can be considered as a therapy for people with diabetes."
Nevertheless, the London, Ontario team has opened up a view of the future just as surely as Banting and Best working in Ontario in the 1920s who first discovered pancreatic insulin cured diabetes in dogs - probably the most important milestone in medical research that paved the way for the modern biopharmaceutical industry, giving people with diabetes a realistic hope for survival and then a long, good quality life.
Related article: Insulin - a Canadian breakthrough
Related article: Progress on pancreatic islet cell transplantation
Reference
David Hess, Li Li, Matthew Martin, Seiji Sakano, David Hill, Brenda Strutt, Sandra Thyssen, Douglas A Gray & Mickie Bhatia. Nature Biotechnology online, 22 June 2003, doi:10.1038/nbt841. "Bone marrow-derived stem cells initiate pancreatic regeneration."
Keywords : Canada London, Ontario Robarts Research Institute Stem Cell Biology Regenerative Medicine University of Western Ontario Asahi Kasei Corp Fuji, Japan Lawson Health Research Institute Centre for Cancer Therapeutics Ottawa Diabetes Pancreas Mouse
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