Diabetes Cure: Human Trial of Type 1 Diabetics With Alginate Coated Islet Cells
An Australian company, Living Cell Technologies, will conduct human trial with Islet cells (insulin producing cells from pancreas) taken from pigs and transplanting them into human diabetes patients. The cells will be coated with alginate, a seaweed derivative which has been used with some success earlier with human islet cells in USA.
If the pig cells work as hoped, they will manufacture insulin naturally within the patients’ bodies, thus reducing the need for them to inject themselves with insulin. Currently the apparent goal of the study is to reduce and not eliminate insulin dependence, a very significant goal if achieved.
The advantage of using cells from pigs is that they would be much more readily available than human islet cells.
The two-year study will take place in Russia, because animal-to-human transplants in Australia were halted under a five-year moratorium ordered by the National Health and Medical Research Council in 2004.
CEO Paul Tan said the six Russian patients would first be monitored for two months to see how well their diabetes was controlled. They would then receive two transplants of the pig cells, six months apart, and their progress would be monitored for two years.”You need to do human trials to know how it will behave in humans,” Dr Tan said. I cannot agree more. However they have to be very careful as in any xenotransplantation there is a distinct risk of infection from higher primates like pigs.
