A New Diabetes Treatment Could Free People From Insulin Injections
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A new therapy for type 1 diabetes could nix the need for insulin injections.
Just a single infusion of lab-grown pancreatic cells let patients' bodies make all the insulin they needed, scientists report June 20 in the New England Journal of Medicine. A year after treatment, 10 out of 12 participants no longer needed supplemental insulin.
This is a landmark study - this cannot be overstated," says Giacomo Lanzoni, a diabetes researcher at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who was not involved in the new work. These lab-grown cells can successfully treat diabetes, he says, and the technique to make them can be scaled up. That opens the door to restoring insulin production for many people with the disease.
Type 1 diabetes affects over 8 million people worldwide. It's an autoimmune disease that pits a person's immune system against the insulin-producing cells in their pancreas, destroying them. Insulin helps sugar pass from the blood to our cells, for energy; without it, sugar stays in the blood, starving cells. People can't survive without insulin," says study coauthor Felicia Pagliuca, a cell biologist and senior vice president at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the Boston-based company behind the new therapy.
T.W. Reichman et al. Stem cell-derived, fully differentiated islets for type 1 diabetes. The New England Journal of Medicine. Published online June 20, 2025. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2506549.
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