Chinese scientists develop cure for Type-1 diabetes in medical breakthrough

Chinese scientists have reportedly found a way to reverse Type-1 diabetes—a disease that until now could only be managed but never cured.

The medical breakthrough is likely to help millions of people worldwide overcome a serious condition that usually starts in childhood.

The disease makes the human body’s immune system mistakenly attack the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, a gland in the abdomen that releases digestive enzymes.

If not managed through regular insulin injections, Type-1 diabetes can lead to more serious problems like nerve damage, blindness and heart and kidney failures.

“A woman with Type-1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving an injection of a stem-cell-derived treatment. She remained free from insulin injections one year after treatment,” members of the research team at Peking University recently told a medical publication.

What’s Type-1 diabetes?

The disease causes the level of glucose or sugar in the blood to become too high. That’s because the body cannot produce a hormone called insulin, which controls blood glucose.

People with this disease need to take insulin every day to keep their blood glucose levels under control.

One important point: Type-1 diabetes is different from Type-2 diabetes, which is linked with age and being overweight. Type-2 diabetes is far more common and affects adults when the body becomes either resistant to insulin or does not make enough insulin.

What’s the cure?

The brief (and non-technical) answer to this question is: stem cell development.

The study carried out by scientists at Peking University in Beijing collected healthy cells—the smallest unit that makes up body tissues—from a patient. Then they “modified” those cells in the lab from non-specialised, random cells to specialised ones capable of producing insulin.

Afterwards, the scientists implanted the newly developed, specialised cells into the same patient who had Type-1 diabetes.

“Remarkably, the cells began producing insulin on their own, allowing the patients to regulate their blood sugar levels after two-and-a-half months without requiring daily insulin injections,” said Stephane Berneau, a faculty member at the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Central Lancashire.

The process involving reversal of Type-1 diabetes through cell modification can broadly be called stem cell therapy.

What are stem cells?

The human body consists of over 37 trillion cells. But all these cells originate from a single cell commonly known as the fertilised egg. As the human body develops and grows, it generates either specialised cells or stem cells.

While specialised cells are supposed to carry out a particular role in the body, stem cells are unable to do any specific function.

But the same stem cells have the potential to be “reprogrammed” to become specialised cells, serving as the human body’s basic repair system.

In other words, stem cells can divide and renew themselves over a long time—a property that makes them useful for medical research purposes.

Scientists have studied for decades ways to transform stem cells into specialised cells for curing illnesses like Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injury, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis.

“One of the most exciting aspects of stem cells is that they can replace damaged or missing cells in the body,” says Berneau, noting that it is “extremely difficult” to get stem cells to behave like the specific insulin-producing cells needed in the pancreas.

Promising results

The study concluded that the female patient who received the insulin-producing cells achieved “sustained insulin independence” within 75 days of transplantation.

“At one year, the clinical data met all study endpoints without indication of transplant-related abnormalities. Promising results from this patient suggest that further clinical studies… are warranted,” it added.

Berneau says the results of the study are “incredibly promising,” and the therapy has the potential to become “widely available in the near future” if large trials prove successful.

“Stem cell therapy is showing us that it might be possible to truly cure diseases that have long been considered only manageable and incurable.”