The News:
A new study out of China announced that stem cells were effective in re-educating the T-cells–the renegade players who cause all the T1D ruckus in the first place–of people with type 1 diabetes.
What This Means for the T1D Community:
This small study–of only 15 people–conducted in China has the potential to be really exciting. I say “potential” because of the need, now, to replicate the study on a much larger scale to prove its findings.
Dr. Yong Zhao
Essentially, the study took donated cord-blood stem cells and mixed them with the blood of a person with T1D (I gather this is something like a blood transfusion, the blood circulating out of the person’s body, where it gets mixed with re-educative stem cells, then circulating back in). Headed up by Dr. Yong Zhao of the University of Illinois at Chicago–the study claims that stem cells were able to teach the T-cells that the body’s own pancreatic beta cells were not in fact enemy hordes and that they could halt their attack!
Check out this excerpt from the abstract in BMC Medicine:
“Stem Cell Educator therapy is safe, and in individuals with moderate or severe T1D, a single treatment produces lasting improvement in metabolic control. Initial results indicate Stem Cell Educator therapy reverses autoimmunity and promotes regeneration of islet beta cells. Successful immune modulation by CB-SCs and the resulting clinical improvement in patient status may have important implications for other autoimmune and inflammation-related diseases without the safety and ethical concerns associated with conventional stem cell-based approaches.”
If this approach works as well as it seems to, this would be exciting news indeed.
But the other point I would make here–and it is another source of serious hope and confidence for me–is that Breakthrough T1D is aware of the study, takes it seriously, and understands the importance of replicating it to verify findings and possibly bring this therapy along.
An organization that is so savvy and thorough and who has its finger so firmly on the pulse certainly makes me feel better about our on-going fight.
If You Want to Read More:
https://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/3/abstract
