Major step toward diabetes cure
Researchers at Harvard say they were able to produce cells that make insulin from embryonic stem cells, which could be a major breakthrough in the treatment ...

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Major step toward diabetes cure - Video

By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Oct. 9, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- In what may be a step toward a cure for type 1 diabetes, researchers say they've developed a large-scale method for turning human embryonic stem cells into fully functioning beta cells capable of producing insulin.

Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder affecting upwards of 3 million Americans, is characterized by the body's destruction of its own insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells. Without insulin, which is needed to convert food into energy, blood sugar regulation is dangerously out of whack.

Currently, people with type 1 diabetes need daily insulin injections to maintain blood sugar control. But "insulin injections don't cure the disease," said study co-author Douglas Melton, of Harvard University. Patients are vulnerable to metabolic swings that can bring about serious complications, including blindness and limb loss, he said at a teleconference this week.

"We wanted to replace insulin injections using nature's own solution, being the pancreatic beta cell," Melton said. Now, "we are reporting the ability to make hundreds of millions of these cells," he added.

Melton ultimately envisions a credit card-sized package of beta cells that can be safely transplanted into a diabetes patient and left in place for a year or more, before needing to be replaced.

But between then and now, human trials must be launched, a venture Melton thinks could begin in about three years.

If that research pans out, the Harvard team's results may prove to be a benchmark in the multi-decade effort to deliver on the promise of stem cell research as a way to access new treatments for all sorts of diseases.

Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard, described his work as a "personal quest," given that he has two children with type 1 diabetes.

He and his colleagues outlined the recent results in the Oct. 9 issue of Cell.

See the original post:
Stem Cell Success Raises Hopes of Type 1 Diabetes Cure

Those with Type 1 diabetes previously known as juvenile onset diabetes, because it usually occurs in childhood produce no insulin and are dependent on daily insulin injections and blood tests. Meltons brilliant team has developed stem cells that can be reprogrammed to produce insulin, obviating the need for injections, and in the longer term helping to avoid common complications such as strokes, kidney disease and blindness, as well as hypos, which can result in coma or death.

On a lighter note, if the success is reproduced in human trials, it will also presumably save me from having to listen to my husbands appalling jokes (a sure sign of low blood sugar is the fact that he finds what he is saying absolutely hilarious), and that theres no chance of us ruining yet another major social occasion.

The most embarrassing one was when the paramedics coming to treat him managed to set off several car alarms hours after my best friends wedding, more or less under the happy couples window.

It will also mean that I wont have physically to sit on top of him to stop him hurting himself while thrashing around semi-conscious at 6ft 3in to my 5ft 5in, thats no easy task. Although, on the downside, it means that I wont make friends with the local team of paramedics. My husband once regained consciousness to hear one ask me, Now, it was America you were about to go to last time we came here to help, wasnt it?

Politicians and health workers have become fixated on Type 2 diabetes, because of its shocking rise; there are now nearly three million people in the country with Type 2, which is often triggered through obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices, as opposed to Type 1, where a patients own immune system turns on itself and destroys pancreatic cells. Diabetes is the fastest-growing health threat of our time accounting for 10 per cent of the NHS budget, while 1 million is spent every hour on diabetes.

Meanwhile, too many children and young people struggle on, trying to manage growing up with a chronic illness that affects their life both dramatically but also in mundane ways never being able to be without blood tests or insulin, trying to juggle sensible eating and drinking while all their friends do what they like with no adverse consequences.

And if they do mess up as all those with diabetes do theres often a lack of understanding and sympathy. Back in 2005, police Tasered a man in a bus depot in Leeds who was having a hypo. In the US, a woman was handcuffed and thrown into a police van after police mistook her hypo for drunkenness.

So think for a moment this week about those around you behaving irrationally, stupidly, disconcertingly. They may just need a bit of understanding and some sugar quickly.

Especially if they are telling awful jokes with their pants on their head.

Gorgeous George is a vote-winner

Excerpt from:
A cure for diabetes and awful jokes