Islet & Pancreas

Are you a scientific anomaly like me?  Have you or someone you know reversed the complications associated with diabetes? Did you suffer microvascular and macrovascular damage during the “growing pains” of coming to terms with having no choice but to live your life with diabetes? Then, did you turn around and find love and hope, which made you change your life? And after changing it, did you find after several years that you were healing the damage that you had incurred by your own misguided hand? 

56 comments - 10 Apr 2008 -

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston have initiated a phase 1 clinical trial to reverse type 1 diabetes.  The trial is exploring whether the promising results from the laboratory of Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, can be applied in human diabetes.

14 comments - 19 Mar 2008 -

Talk of a cure has been around forever. Sometimes it seems as if the cure is a constantly receding dream, always ten years away or just around the next corner.

10 comments - 9 Mar 2008 - Not Yet Rated

City of Hope researchers were among the more than 50 international investigators reporting advances against type 1 diabetes at the recent Rachmiel Levine Diabetes and Obesity Symposium in Newport Beach, Calif.

4 comments - 9 Feb 2008 -

Sponsor a pig and you can help a unique collaboration between Spring Point Project and the University of Minnesota to begin transplanting insulin-producing islet cells from pigs to humans within the next two years.

9 comments - 24 Jan 2008 -

Awhile back, three macaque monkeys with type 1 diabetes received transplants of 19 pig pancreas primordia, each one smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

4 comments - 31 Dec 2007 -

First we find out that our belly fat is an endocrine organ, and now it's our bones. Dr. Gerard Karsenty of Columbia University has discovered that bone-building cells (osteoblasts) secrete a hormone called osteocalcin that not only tells the beta cells to secrete more insulin, but also causes the number of beta cells themselves to increase.

0 comments - 18 Nov 2007 -

Living Cells Technologies (LCT) has announced that their Moscow trial of pig cell implantation, which began in June, is well underway: In September, the second of six type 1 patients was injected with 5,000 "islet equivalents per kilogram" of Diabecells into the peritoneal cavity.

2 comments - 14 Nov 2007 -

Despite their best efforts, researchers have been having a hard time getting pancreatic stem cells to grow up into beta cells that can be used for transplantation.

0 comments - 27 Sep 2007 -

When islet cells are transplanted into a person, they don't go into their usual home in the pancreas. Instead, they're injected into the portal vein, the large vein that feeds the liver with rich fats and sugars from the digestive system.

0 comments - 14 Sep 2007 -