Stem Cell and Gene Therapy for Diabetes
Abstract
The incidence of diabetes is increasing worldwide, both Type 1 and Type II, Type II being particularly associated in developing countries with obesity and change of diet. Insulin therapy has saved the lives of countless sufferers from Type 1 diabetes but even with the best and most conscientious treatment diabetic patients, both Type 1 and Type II, are liable to serious and sometimes fatal complications of blindness, renal failure, heart failure, vascular disease, particularly gangrene, neurop- athy and potential fatal disturbances of blood sugar levels. No clinical doctor can avoid being aware of diabetes as a severe disease, consuming vast financial resources and, at the same time, causing great misery.
In the past 40 years attempts have been made to treat diabetes using transplantation of the vascularised pancreas or separated islets. Both modalities can give excellent results, especially in patients with renal failure from diabetes requiring a kidney transplant, so that transplantation of the pancreas or islets can occur in a patient already requiring immunosuppressive treatment. However both these forms of therapy require tissue or organs from a dead donor and the shortage of donors makes transplantation impractical for most of the huge population of diabetes sufferers. Many research workers hope that tissue from animals, especially pigs, might be used as transplant material with an inexhaustible supply. Unfortunately the immunological hurdles of transplanting from an animal to man are far from solved and not even fully understood. Xenografting has similarities to a race in which hurdles have to be overcome but it is only after each successful jump that the next hazard becomes apparent and the full course of the race is not yet clear.
Keywords:diabetes Type I and Type II, embryonic stem cells, adult fibroblast cultures, iPS cells, аuto-transplantation of cells, no islet regeneration
Clin. Experiment. Surg. Petrovsky J. – 2013. – N 1. – Р. 97–99.