Every month, I’ll be highlighting Diabetes research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: “Diabetics’ damaged cells regenerated to produce insulin”…
In a development that is straight out of a science fiction movie (if you DON’T know, I write science fiction. Once of my first stories was about a treatment for Alzheimer’s based on research that was current when the story was published 24 years ago. (Nothing has come of it yet, but world-wide, research into Alzheimer’s is growing more and more active.) If you’re interested, the story is reproduced on my website here: https://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-pig-tale-by-guy-stewart-analog.html
This is another one of those VERY, VERY, VERY EARLY kinds of research directions. It’s something I’ve wondered about, and now I’m seeing that others – people who can actually DO something about it – are making strides.
The concept, as I noted above, has to do with regeneration damaged cells in the pancreas that either don’t produce enough insulin, produce it at the wrong time, or as in Type 1 diabetes, it stops producing ANY insulin.
In Type 1 diabetes, “Pancreatic beta-cells make, store, and release insulin. But, in Type 1, a person’s own immune system, instead of protecting the pancreas from disease, ATTACKS it, destroying these beta-cells over time, leading to a lifelong dependence on self-injected insulin or an external insulin pump in order to live.”
Type 2 diabetes, of course, is different. If we miss our pills or forget our Ozempic, we’re not going to die immediately. Type 1, which you probably know, IS that serious.
The research in this article is about REGROWING YOUR OWN CELLS back in the pancreas so that your own body starts to make the right amount of insulin and makes sure it gets to where it needs to go!
“Researchers at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, have brought us a step closer to making [regeneration] a reality, regenerating damaged pancreatic cells so they can produce insulin and functionally respond to blood glucose levels.” Remember – RIGHT NOW, this is ONLY for people who have Type 1 diabetes – the kids, like my friend Greg – whose pancreas stopped producing insulin when he was just a kid.”
SO, what is pancreatic regeneration? The CAUSE of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes is that something happens to the cells in the pancreas that MAKE insulin. In Type 1, the cells totally shut down. The (kid usually) gets NO insulin from the pancreas – before 1921 and the launching of an effort to cure diabetes, if you were diagnosed with diabetes, the doctor would shake your hand, and if you were an adult, they’d say, “I’m sorry, Guy. See to it that you get your affairs in order now. You may not have much time left on this good Earth.”
For kids? In 1921, they probably didn’t say anything to the kid. They just told the parents that their kid would be dying some time in the next year or so and to get ready for it. Of course, kids OFTEN died of things we don’t worry about anymore: “polio, measles, smallpox, whooping cough, diarrhea (yeah, you read that right – here. In the US. It’s still a deadly condition all over Africa, South America, and in any other country where they don’t have the medical resources we do…), as well as pneumonia, the flu, and tuberculosis…children under 5 accounted for 40 percent of all deaths from these infections.”
So here was the conclusion of the study linked below: “Recent insights have shown that pancreatic cells establish continuous and close crosstalk by sharing regulatory pathways, molecules and signals, suggesting that the exocrine and endocrine organs cannot be considered separately. In this scenario, looking at the overall pancreas rather than focusing on a single cell type may be a successful choice to finding the right path to regenerate β-cells, and a cure for type 2 diabetes.”
English? This: “The healthy cells in your pancreas constant and close communication with each other. They don’t ‘talk’ with tiny cell mouths – they use chemicals that they make to ‘tell’ other cells what’s going on in the pancreas. For some time, scientists believed that the outer parts of the pancreas and the inner parts were totally separate. But recent research suggests that the pancreas ONLY HAS ONE SYSTEM.” This study has started to look at how the entire pancreas works together – and they theorize that something has gone wrong with how the cells communicate with each other.”
EVERYTHING in your body communicates. There are several kinds of muscles in your heart that work together to keep it pumping. The study theorizes that if we could figure out what’s going wrong with the cell communication, we could devise a way to correct that – and the pancreas would begin to make the right amount of insulin again – either TOTALLY like in Type 1; or PARTIALLY like in my Type 2! In this study, “…researchers…looked at the ability of two drugs normally used to treat rare forms of cancer. They wanted to measure how much the drug would ‘turn the pancreas cells back on, healing what had been damaged.’ After 48 hours of stimulation with the drugs, the reprogrammed cells produced and secreted insulin at the right time.”
So…there’s HOPE here! Not tomorrow; not next year; but they’ve made a breakthrough – and they know WHAT to do now.
Links: https://newatlas.com/medical/regenerate-pancreatic-beta-cells-insulin-type-1-diabetes/;
article quoted above (August 2023) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10331309/
Youtube showing the procedure above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKHjt4rwg4
Youtube showing the procedure above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKHjt4rwg4
