How the ban on adult stem cells affects the fight against diabetes

Harvard researcher Dr. Denise Faustman thinks she can cure type 1 (or juvenile) diabetes. She’s done it in mice and wants to try it on humans. She’s gotten financial backing from the Lee Iacocca Foundation and other groups, but needs millions more.

She isn’t going to get it from the world’s largest diabetes foundation, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, for reasons having little to do with the potential of her work.

Source: Naples Daily News: Columnists(requires free registration)

In Edmonton protocol you have 50% chance of success. Also it requires you to be on immunosuppresive regimen, making it more suitable for kidney transplant recepients.

Ultimately no treatment of type 1 can be permanent if the pancreas remains under siege. “It doesn’t matter if you have a big vat of (new islet) cells,” says Faustman, “you still have to deal with the underlying disease.”

So Faustman gave severely diabetic mice a cheap generic drug that stimulates the immune system, causing the release of a protein called tumor necrosis factor. TNF kills activated white blood cells. As she hoped, the attack on the islet cells stopped. Then, to her astonishment — and that of the medical world — the islet cells regenerated.

The explanation, Faustman believed, lay in stem cells from the spleen. Long considered a dispensable organ, the spleen is a rich source of non-embryonic stem cells (also called “adult stem cells”) that may be as pliable as embryonic stem cells are claimed to be. In 2003 Faustman and colleagues confirmed this in a study appearing in Science magazine. They gave male spleen cells to female mice and sure enough the regenerated islets had the male Y chromosome.

As we all know the results of mice studies do not always transfer to humans.

Of course, mice aren’t little people. But there appear to be no significant differences between mouse and human endocrine systems. Indeed, “The same cell pathway that is defective in a subset of mouse white blood cells is now known to be defective in type 1 diabetes, human lupus and human Crohn’s disease,” Faustman told me.

And this approach has support from different quarters.

“In my view this is the most promising research currently and certainly worth pursuing,” says Larry Raff, president of the Autoimmune Disease Research Foundation. Scientists I interviewed, such as University of Kansas stem cell researcher Linda Mitchell, agreed.

Let us all hope for the best.