Archive for the ‘Current Research’ Category

In the thread from my last essay I was asked my opinion of a recent paper from Washington University St. Louis showing progress in islet xenotransplantation. My quick read from the online abstract was positive. This week I decided to get the whole article and comment on it in more detail.

The authors claim “This is the first report of prolonged engraftment and sustained normalization of glucose tolerance following transplantation of porcine islets in nonimmune-suppressed, immunocompetent rodents. The data are consistent with tolerance induction….” This is important because tolerance induction could permit transplantation of islets of Langerhans without immune suppression drugs and without encapsulation — it’s the ideal solution to the immune suppression problem. Did they show true tolerance induction? After studying the paper, I choose the Scottish verdict: “Not proven.”

Hanuman Medical Foundation’s grant support for the Solving Diabetes Project began in the fall of 2008. From a standing start we are now getting interesting and significant results in treatment of experimental animal diabetes. Here is a brief report on these developments.

On the plane yesterday I felt a tickle in my mind — prickly skin, a feeling of greater alertness, a touch of fear. Could my blood sugar be dropping? A quick check, and I find it is 78. My hypoglycemia awareness kicked in exactly as my blood sugar passed through 80 on the way down. A few M&Ms and the fear went away in a few minutes. If I had not learned about my sugar drop, and done nothing, eventually…….

The Artificial Pancreas is in the News, I think mostly because it has become a high profile cause of the JDRF. The idea is not new. I remember when writing “Prospects in Diabetes Therapy” in 1980 I interviewed Dr. Robert Fischell at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. He was working on an artificial pancreas (then called the ‘closed loop pump’) and predicted it would be ready in five years. Dr. Fischell is credited with inventing the implantable insulin pump, but he could never get the artificial pancreas to work.

I have chosen to comment on this paper because it has good science and has attracted notice. Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to see how this work could possibly be construed to bring us any nearer at all to a cure.

“This study was designed to test the hypothesis that macroencapsulated human β-cell precursors transplanted into severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mice can survive and mature into functional β-cells in vivo.” Here is what these researchers at Burnham Institute in San Diego did.

The biggest little-known effort to cure type 1 diabetes is called The Sanford Project. The project is a result of T. Denny Sanford’s extraordinary 2007 gift of $400 million to the University of South Dakota and the nonprofit Sioux Valley Medical System (renamed the Sanford Health System). Mr. Sanford made his money in the credit card business and is using his fortune to improve his native Sioux Falls with high quality health care and leading health care research.

We are told that if you are overweight it is your own fault for eating too much! The logic is like a tub of water where the water stands for food energy. To live and move a certain amount of water drains out of the tub, so you eat to fill the tub again. The energy level drops an inch, so we eat, it goes up an inch, and our weight remains the same. Very simple, but only partly true.

Before there was insulin diabetes was fatal, usually in a few weeks, always in a year. Even today some people die from type 1 diabetes. Our concern in this era of diabetes management is using all of the tools we have to simulate the activity of islets of Langerhans; the input is insulin and the output is glucose levels in the blood.

One of the pleasures of the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in June is the plenary address of the winner of the highest award given for scientific achievement, the Banting Award (named for one of the discoverers of insulin). This year’s winner was George Eisenbarth of The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Denver and his achievement was nothing less than the demonstration that type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease.