SMART NEWS

World-First Stem Cell Treatment Reverses Diabetes for a Patient in China, Study Suggests

Scientists converted the patient’s own cells into blood sugar-regulating cell clusters before injecting them back into her abdomen—and one year later, she still doesn’t need insulin injections

Margherita Bassi

Daily Correspondent

an illustration of a stem cell, a sphere with ridges on top and tendrils coming from the bottom half
An illustration of a pluripotent stem cell, which can be coaxed to develop into various kinds of tissue MedicalRF.com via Getty Images

Last year, cell biologist Deng Hongkui and his team at Peking University in Beijing took cells from a woman with type 1 diabetes, reprogrammed them into blood sugar-regulating cell clusters and injected them back into her abdomen.

The procedure was a world first—no other type 1 diabetes patient had been treated with their own cells. Two and a half months later, the young woman started producing enough of her own insulin to not need injections of the hormone anymore. Now, more than a year has passed since the treatment, and in another world first, her ability to produce insulin has remained stable. The results of the trial were recently published in the journal Cell.

“I can eat sugar now,” the woman, who lives in Tianjin, China, and wishes to remain anonymous, tells Nature News’ Smriti Mallapaty. “I enjoy eating everything—especially hotpot.”

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, which are found in clusters called islets. These cells secrete hormones to regulate blood sugar levels. This immune response results in chronic high blood sugar for diabetes patients, which can lead to other serious health conditions. China currently has the highest number of diabetes cases in the world.

Islet or pancreatic transplants can be an effective long-term treatment, but there aren’t enough donors to make it a scalable solution. Plus, patients would need to take immune suppressant medication to prevent their body from rejecting the transplant. Studies over the past decade have suggested that treatment via pluripotent stem cells—a type of unspecialized cell that can develop into other types of cells—could lead to a cure, per the Independent’s Vishwam Sankaran.

That’s where Deng and his team came in. They reprogrammed the woman’s extracted cells from fat tissue and chemically transformed them into pluripotent stem cells. Then, they coaxed those stem cells to convert into islets.

The team injected the equivalent of 1.5 million islets into the patient’s abdomen, rather than her liver, where islet transplants are usually injected, per Nature News. That’s because the transplanted cells cannot be observed in the liver, but in the abdomen, the scientists can keep an eye on the islets with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and know whether it’s necessary to remove them.

The woman had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes more than a decade ago, per the South China Morning Post’s Zhang Tong. Before this trial, she had received two liver transplants and one failed islet cell transplant. But a year after the experimental surgery that lasted less than half an hour, the woman’s blood sugar levels were within an appropriate range for more than 98 percent of the day.

“The beauty of this approach is that they are the patients’ own cells—so organ and tissue rejection is not a concern, and no or far less anti-rejection medications are needed,” James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alberta in Canada and lead author of a 2021 study analyzing the safety of implanting type 1 diabetes patients with stem cell-derived islets, says to Medical News Today’s Hannah Flynn. “But I am indeed exceedingly impressed with the stunning results the Tianjin team achieved in their first patient. This is truly incredible.”

Since the woman was already taking immunosuppressants for her previous liver transplant, the scientists can’t prove that using her own cells for the experimental procedure was the reason her body avoided a rejection—more study is needed.

The trial includes two more patients who were operated on after the woman. Their one year post-treatment mark is coming up in November, but the results are already “very positive,” Deng tells Nature News. Afterward, he hopes to expand the trial to more patients.

“That’s remarkable,” Daisuke Yabe, a diabetes researcher at Kyoto University in Japan, tells Nature News. “If this is applicable to other patients, it’s going to be wonderful.”

The challenge, in fact, will be taking the treatment to a global scale. But for now, the results suggest the trial is paving the way for stem cell therapy in the treatment of diabetes.

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Margherita Bassi

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.