Adult stem cells from the brain may help diabetics
Diabetic patients living on a budget could save money on their medical bills by shopping at a Canadian internet pharmacy, many of which sell cheap over the counter medications, including insulin.
Diabetic patients living on a budget could save money on their medical bills by shopping at a Canadian internet pharmacy, many of which sell cheap over the counter medications, including insulin. Scientists are looking for more therapeutic approaches to helping diabetics control their blood sugar. New research from Japan suggests that adult stem cells from the brain may be one avenue to pursue.
A transplant of insulin-producing beta cells for the pancreas would be an ideal therapeutic approach for diabetes, but there is no reliable source for steady donations. A team of scientists hypothesized that neural stem cells from the brain can adapt to help diabetics when transplanted to the pancreas.
Various organ systems in the body contain adult stem cells, which can differentiate into different types of cells related to that system. Researchers from Japan conducted an experiment in which they took neural stem cells from the easily accessible hippocampus and olfactory bulb and transplanted them to the pancreases of diabetic rats. Results showed that after the transplant, the neural stem cells began behaving like beta cells, as published in EMBO Molecular Medicine.
The "team found that transplanting neural stem cells directly into the pancreas can unleash their intrinsic ability to act as critical regulators of insulin production, and most importantly they demonstrated that the cells could be gained from a patient without the need for genetic manipulation," wrote researchers Onur Basak and Hans Clevers in their commentary on the Japanese study.
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