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Stem Cells 'Could Cure Diabetes' |
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Tuesday, 05 December 2006 |
Source: The Austrlian
From correspondents in Cape Town, South Africa
STEM cell science may yield a cure for diabetes, which currently afflicts nearly 250 million people, an expert told a conference in Cape Town.
“We are making huge progress,” diabetologist and stem cell researcher Wendy Macfarlane of Britain's Brighton University told delegates attending the giant international diabetes conference.
“Advances made in the past two to three years have been astonishing. The prospects are very exciting.”
Research is under way to try to convert embryonic and adult stem cells into insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells.
Stem cells are precursor cells that can metamorphose into any kind of cell.
Ms Macfarlane said a perfect replacement beta cell had yet to be created but researchers in the United States hoped to achieve this and start clinical trials in animals by the turn of the decade.
“The progress they've made this far suggests they will probably meet that goal.”
The aim is to create a glucose-sensitive, insulin-producing cell which responds to changes in physiological glucose like a pancreatic cell in a normal body.
“They have been able to get a degree of mimicking of the normal developmental process that I don't think we could have imagined a few years ago,” Ms Macfarlane said on the sidelines of the congress.
“What we've got are cells that will secrete insulin in response to glucose, but not yet something that works exactly like an adult beta cell.”
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