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STEM CELLS & DIABETES

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volare

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Hello everyone,
I'm new to this forum and have just made a quick and unsuccessful search for anything interesting to do with Stem Cell therapy for Diabetes 2. Does anyone know anything about this? What it involves? I'd be interested in as many views as possible, even if you feel you don't know much. I'm not a diabetic but I'm trying to understand real people's views on the matter (i.e not just the Drs, scientists, etc.)...
Hope you don't mind helping me with this :)
Volare
 
There is a focus on embryo stem cells, but as embryos are the beginning of babies, and are potentially viable human life, the lines indicated below should be the areas of research.

Umbilical cord 'stem cell' hope

Scientists believe they have found a way to get plentiful stem cells from umbilical cord blood to treat people with diseases.

Stem cells have the potential to turn into many different types of tissue, but using embryonic stem cells is controversial.
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Adult stem cells

While embryonic stem cell potential remains untested, adult stem cell treatments have been used for many years to treat successfully leukemia and related bone/blood cancers through bone marrow transplants.[19] The use of adult stem cells in research and therapy is not as controversial as embryonic stem cells, because the production of adult stem cells does not require the destruction of an embryo. Consequently, more US government funding is being provided for adult stem cell research.[20]
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Interesting article, but I have strong doubts about the claims they are making. For example:

"This new therapeutic modality with the application of Stem Cells could lead to a cure or improve the prognosis of diabetes in more than 80% of patients. 92% of the diabetes patients in the world have "Type 2 Diabetes"."

This assumes that 80% of the world's Type-2s have impaired insulin production and no insulin resistance. Whereas the truth is that nearly all Type-2s have insulin resistance to varying degrees, which is why they are prescribed metformin. Metformin doesn't encourage insulin production - it simply makes the insulin that is produced work more effectively.
 
IanD said:
Stem Cell Breakthrough Helps 85% Of Type 2 Diabetes Patients
Click to expand...
A very interesting article, and the research comes from a world class lab. However, it is quite old news (the original work was published in 2005), and I can't find anything more recent on this. Given its importance if this is right, and the speed that this area is moving at, this lack of any follow-up publications implies to me that these guys have hit big problems with their work. Although stem cells have tremendous potential in all sorts of areas, they aren't a panacea and there are often mountainous technical difficulties to overcome.

That said, it is worth keeping an eye out for future diabetes work by Fernandez Viña - maybe the big paper is just around the corner!
 
Many thanks for these comments. It does seem that, for many of us, Stem Cells = embryos, period.
I have done a bit more sleuthing; and there do seem to be a few medical papers demonstrating Adult Stem Cell success, but I chatted with a Dr this morning, an ASC believer, who suggested a) most patients have low awareness of ASC and b) most Drs are 'unbelievers'. I am surprised there is almost nothing on diabetes.co.uk about the emergent work in this area. Is ASC therapy something that any of you would consider? Or is the (perceived) expense / work involved in finding an (adult) stem cell treatment simply too much to bother with ? A very close friend is a very well controlled diabetic, so it is hard for me to gauge just how destabilising / difficult living with diabetes 2 is for the majority.
 
As far as I am aware, all stem cell therapy for diabetes (as with stem cell therapy for anything else for that matter) is still very much experimental. There is a lot of research being done (more for T1 than T2 - because that area is more promising), and it gets a lot of press coverage because of the enormous potential. This is the glamorous end of science! Any team that comes up with a cure for diabetes will, to put it mildly, become scientific superstars (we are talking nobel prizes here).

However, this is all a long way off becoming any sort of mainstream treatment. Researchers do use small numbers of volunteers in trials, but that is an infinitesimal number in comparison with all of the diabetes sufferers out there. The only way that could happen is if you lived near somewhere that this research was being done, and happened to be around at the exact time that they were looking for volunteers. Essentially you need to be in the right place at the right time. If you are a patient of a specialist endocrinologist in one of the major University hospitals (that is usually where this sort of work is done) then you could ask if there are any local research programmes in need of volunteers. Even if you do find such a programme, then you should still think long and hard about becoming involved. Having an experimental treatment is not without risk - things can and do go wrong (that is why it is experimental). For example, one of the many problems with a lot of stem cell therapy at the moment is that it requires the use of immunosupressive drugs - rather like organ transplantation. These can be quite unpleasant, and the side effects of the drugs could easily be worse than the diabetes! If you do get involved in this sort of trial then the researchers would spend a lot of time making you aware of the risks (informed consent is a basic ethical requirement of research involving human test subjects).

I have been watching the whole stem cell area with a lot of interest for a while now (since long before I was diagnosed), and I know people who are working on this. It is fascinating and very promising. I fully expect that new treatments will become available for diabetes - and many other conditions - within my lifetime. However, I don't expect this to happen any time soon - it is probably years and possibly decades off.
 
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