Archive for the ‘Current Research’ Category

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.