Stem Cells Used To Treat Type 2 Diabetes

by Marcela Valente

(IPS) BUENOS AIRES -- A team of doctors in Argentina has pioneered a new technique using adult stem cells for treating diabetes.

Dr. Jorge Saslavsky, the head of the medical team, told IPS that the experiment involved the injection of adult stem cells into a diabetic patient, using stem cells harvested from the patient himself.

It was the first time that the procedure had been used to treat diabetes, and the doctors confirmed that the patient's pancreas, which had ceased to produce insulin, began to function again as a result of the treatment.

The medical team participating in this groundbreaking experiment was made up of cardiologists, hematologists, radiologists and other specialists from the San Nicolas Clinic in the eastern Argentine province of Buenos Aires and the Bone Marrow Transplant Center in Rosario, in the neighboring province of Santa Fe.

The team has been using the same procedure for some time now to treat victims of heart attacks, injecting stem cells into the damaged heart tissue to promote recovery. Earlier this month, they used the technique for the first time on a diabetic patient.

Diabetes is a chronic illness with two forms, known as Type 1 and Type 2. In Type 1 diabetes, the patients' pancreases produce very little or no insulin, and they are dependent on artificial insulin, usually in the form of daily injections, to maintain the proper level of blood glucose (also known as blood sugar).

In Type 2 diabetes, the pancreas continue to produce insulin, but the body's tissues are unable to use it properly. In response, the pancreas produce more insulin as a means of compensating. While medication can often be used to treat this insulin resistance, there are cases where the deterioration of the pancreas can lead to Type 1 diabetes and insulin dependence.

The patient chosen for the first clinical trial was a 42-year-old Argentine man suffering from Type 2 diabetes who had stopped producing insulin, said Saslavsky.

The doctors began by extracting bone marrow in a procedure that required 10 minutes of general anaesthesia. The stem cells were harvested from the marrow and injected through a catheter into the pancreas, with no need for surgery.

The entire procedure was carried out in a single day. The bone marrow was extracted in the morning, and the stem cells were injected during a two-hour process later in the day. "That evening, the patient walked out of the hospital," Saslavsky said.

In preliminary control studies, the doctors observed that the pancreas began to produce insulin again, not in the normal amount, but at the levels of a Type 2 diabetes patient.

"In this case, we did not expect the patient to be cured, but rather to improve to the point of a diabetic who can be successfully treated with medication," Saslavsky explained.

The results of this pioneering experiment have opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the treatment of the disease.

The research team does not know how long the benefits of the injection will last, or if the procedure will be effective in Type I or insulin-dependent diabetics. "We still haven't tried it," noted Saslavsky.

However, he stressed, the procedure is an extremely simple one that requires nothing more than the patient's consent, and has no potentially negative side effects. "The worst that can happen is that it doesn't have any beneficial effect, but it is completely harmless," he said.

As of now, the doctors have yet to publish their results in scientific journals, and have not considered patenting the procedure. Publication would require a larger number of test cases and more time to observe the effects, and the technique is not novel enough to patent.

"We combined various techniques that have been used in the past for other purposes," Saslavsky said. At the San Nicolas Clinic alone, stem cells have been injected into the hearts of close to 100 patients who have suffered heart attacks.

Stem cells can transform themselves into any kind of cell in the human body, including neurons or brain cells, which is why this field of medical research offers such enormous potential.

There are two types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are harvested from embryos created through in vitro fertilization, while adult stem cells are readily available in sources like the pancreas and brain, although they are most easily harvested from bone marrow.

Stem cells do not age, and can be used to regenerate tissue and organs even in elderly patients. "When patients are old, they have fewer stem cells, but the quality of the cells does not change," said Saslavsky.

Embryonic stem cell research has generated enormous expectations in the medical community, he noted, but because the process used to harvest the cells kills the embryo, it has become an extremely controversial issue, which makes the advances achieved with adult stem cells even more significant.

Nevertheless, there has been a far greater emphasis worldwide on embryonic stem cell research as opposed to adult stem cell research, and Saslavsky believes the reason could be economic. Because the procedures involved in embryonic stem cell research are far more complicated, they can attract greater funding for laboratories, while resulting treatments would be more costly as well.

By contrast, the procedure for using adult stem cells from the same patient is much simpler and thus far less expensive, as it is limited to the cost of the catheters used to extract the bone marrow and inject the stem cells and the reagents needed to harvest them.

Moreover, even if there were an easier, less costly way of cultivating embryonic stem cells, there would still be the risk of rejection, since they would have a different genetic composition than that of the recipient.

In the past, there have been cases of diabetics receiving treatment in the form of grafts of pancreatic tissue from recently deceased donors, but the technique is risky precisely because of the potential for rejection, Saslavsky noted.

"What is completely novel about this technique is that the stem cells come from the patients themselves, which means there is no danger of rejection and resulting damage to the pancreas," he said.

The progress observed in the subject of this groundbreaking experiment, who remains anonymous, could provide a key to combating diabetes, which is a leading cause of death in many countries.