Stem cells for diabetes investigated further

The use of stem cells as a diabetes treatment has been under investigation for many years. Current opinion is that stem cell treatment, although temporarily effective in a number of cases, is not a permanent solution to diabetes . However, a new study indicates that stem cell treatment could one day become an accepted and extremely powerful tool in the fight against diabetes.
According to researchers at the centre for Gene Therapy at the Tulane University Health Sciences Centre in New Orleans, stem cell therapy could one day repair insulin making cells and fix damaged kidney cells.
The director of the centre, Dr. Prockop, said: “It looks like we are doing two things, lowering blood sugar and sending cells to the kidney. That’s very exciting because there are about 8 million people out there with diabetes and kidney damage and nothing to offer in the way of treatment.”
Another expert, Dr. Kulkarni of Harvard, said: “It’s an interesting, novel finding, although obviously some more work needs to be done. We are still many steps from figuring out what’s happening in humans, but this is one step towards realizing the goal of trying to figure out what stem cells do.”
Although the mechanism of the treatment is still little understood, great value should be placed in trials of this nature, for they potentially hold the key to a future cure for diabetes.