No more insulin injections?
In patients suffering from Type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks the pancreas, eventually leaving patients without the ability to naturally control blood sugar. These patients must carefully monitor the amount of sugar in their blood, measuring it several times a day and then injecting themselves with insulin to keep their blood sugar levels within a healthy range. However, precise control of blood sugar is difficult to achieve, and patients face a range of long-term medical problems as a result. A better diabetes treatment, many researchers believe, would be to replace patients’ destroyed pancreatic islet cells with healthy cells that could take over glucose monitoring and insulin release. This approach has been used in hundreds of patients, but it has one major drawback — the patients’ immune systems attack the transplanted cells, requiring patients to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. Now, a new advance from MIT, Boston Children’s...