An essential discovery has recently brought hope to the tens of millions of individuals worldwide living with type 1 diabetes. In one World firstscientists have successfully used stem cell therapy to reverse type 1 diabetes in a girl.
This achievement is being hailed as a Important medical advancesAs it offers a possible cure for a disease that has to date only been managed but not cured.
Type 1 diabetes is a serious condition that sometimes begins in childhood or early adolescence. In individuals with this condition, the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the cells within the pancreas that produce insulin.
Insulin is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels. Without it, blood sugar can rise dangerously high. Over time, this could result in serious health complications, equivalent to heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure and blindness.
People with type 1 diabetes have to take every day insulin injections or use an insulin pump to administer their blood sugar levels. Despite these treatments, the disease will be difficult to administer, and patients often face life-long complications. That's why this recent stem cell therapy has generated a lot excitement – it could offer an actual solution.
The average human body consists of approx 37.2 trillion cellsThat is 300 times greater than the variety of stars in our galaxy. All of our adult cells come from a single cell, called a fertilized egg (or zygote) that divides and differentiates into specialized cells and adult stem cells during our development. A zygote is an early stem cell capable of manufacturing a brand new person.
Adult stem cells The body has specialized cells that may transform right into a limited variety of cell types. Scientists have been studying stem cells for years and attempting to reprogram specialized cells into stem cells, hoping to make use of them to treat various diseases.
One of essentially the most exciting points of stem cells is that they will replace damaged or missing cells within the body. At the University of Central Lancashire, My research team is using induced-pluripotent brain stem cells that were reprogrammed from the skin cells of Alzheimer's disease patients. Our goal is to learn more about degenerative brain disease and its development in a petri dish without invasive techniques.
In the case of type 1 diabetes, scientists wondered if stem cells could possibly be used to interchange insulin-producing cells that the body had destroyed. Getting stem cells to behave like the particular insulin-producing cells required within the pancreas is incredibly difficult.
In a recent trial, scientists Peking University in Beijing Cells are taken from a donor and transformed within the laboratory into insulin-producing cells. These newly produced cells were then transplanted into patients with type 1 diabetes.
Remarkably, the cells began to supply insulin on their very own, allowing patients to regulate their blood sugar levels without the necessity for every day insulin injections after two and a half months.
This is why therapy is known as a. Possible “cures” For type 1 diabetes. Although it's still early days, the outcomes are incredibly promising, and if more large trials are successful this therapy could develop into widely available within the near future.
Obstacles are yet to be overcome.
One problem is the body's immune system, which may attack newly transplanted cells as a part of the condition of type 1 diabetes. Scientists are working on ways to forestall this and make sure that the transplanted cells behave in the identical way for a few years as in comparison with the initial stage within the Petri dish.
Making the therapy accessible to more people shall be one other big challenge. If approved, stem cell treatments are expensive and complex, so researchers are on the lookout for ways to expand the method by utilizing the patient's own cells to avoid rejection of the transplanted cells. will be saved from
Despite these obstacles, recent discoveries have created a wave of hope and optimism for patients with type 1 diabetes. Stem cell therapy is showing us that diseases which have long been considered manageable and incurable are truly treatable.