Cell regeneration brings hope for diabetics - Mice can regenerate insulin-producing cells.

One treatment for diabetes would be to promote the production of new insulin-making cells.MoodboardSome cells in the adult pancreas can, in times of extreme stress, produce new insulin-secreting cells, researchers have found.

The findings, based on work performed in mice, open up a new approach to replacing insulin-secreting cells in patients with diabetes. They also address a raging controversy within the diabetes research community over whether such cells even exist.

“It’s a big discovery,” says Emmanuel Baetge, chief scientific officer of Novocell, a stem cell company based in San Diego, California who was not involved with the work. “I think this will heat up the whole field.”

The blood and heart are known to be supplied with new cells by adult stem cells capable of generating a fresh stock. If such regenerative stem cells existed in the pancreas, they could perhaps be harnessed to restock the supply of pancreatic ß cells, which in turn produce insulin. This could form the basis of treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes who have fewer ß cells.

At least, that was the hope. Researchers tried and failed repeatedly to find such cells in the pancreas. “Most people, including me, concluded that the pancreas was very different,” says Douglas Melton, a Harvard University stem-cell researcher in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Limited options Without regenerative stem cells, there seemed to be only two ways to generate new ß cells in diabetics: encourage whatever few ß cells the patient still has to divide; or programme embryonic stem cells to produce the needed cell type and inject those into the patient.

Unfortunately, ß cells are difficult to isolate and grow very slowly in culture, making it difficult to boost their numbers. Embryonic stem cells are easier to grow, but difficult to programme. “There, the challenge is how to tell...,”

After I got to the abstract, I clicked on the link for the complete article. It opened for me. That's the URL that I used for the link. Good luck.

β Cells Can Be Generated from Endogenous Progenitors in Injured Adult Mouse Pancreas

Novel strategies in diabetes therapy would obviously benefit from the use of beta (β) cell stem/progenitor cells. However, whether or not adult β cell progenitors exist is one of the most controversial issues in today's diabetes research. Guided by the expression of Neurogenin 3 (Ngn3), the earliest islet cell-specific transcription factor in embryonic development, we show that β cell progenitors can be activated in injured adult mouse pancreas and are located in the ductal lining. Differentiation of the adult progenitors is Ngn3 dependent and gives rise to all islet cell types, including glucose responsive β cells that subsequently proliferate, both in situ and when cultured in embryonic pancreas explants. Multipotent progenitor cells thus exist in the pancreas of adult mice and can be activated cell autonomously to increase the functional β cell mass by differentiation and proliferation rather than by self-duplication of pre-existing β cells only.

BTTT

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