The Type 1 Diabetes Program of The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust has announced the launch of the Diabetes Data Innovation Initiative through which it will provide up to $5 million in funding over the next two years. The funding will go to innovative solutions that enable the use of data to ease the burden of type 1 diabetes (T1D) for those living with the disease, their caregivers and healthcare providers.
Category: Research
Scientists have successfully reversed type 1 diabetes in mice by using adult stem cells and cell surface molecular engineering to reduce the destruction of insulin-producing islet cells.
The key to the breakthrough was introducing adult stem cells...
Researchers with the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson recently announced a plan to prevent type 1 diabetes by intercepting the disease in its earliest stages and stopping its development before the onset of symptoms.
Researchers at MIT successfully tested an engineered “smart insulin” on mice that reacts to blood sugar levels.
“To make insulin that is…
Janssen Research & Development, one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, announced that it will invest in a novel scientific approach, called disease interception, to find ways to intercept type 1 diabetes using new diagnostic and pre-disease intervention strategies. If successful, this approach has the potential to transform the standard of care in type 1 diabetes.
Knowing more about the type of T cell that causes type 1 is definitely good news for future treatments...
The benefit of making mature beta cells entirely in the dish is that they may be a useful resource for research aimed at understanding the causes of diabetes (both Type 1 and Type 2) as well as developing new therapeutic strategies for diabetes. Moreover, ultimately, mature beta cells may prove to be better than pancreatic progenitor cells for transplant into patients with diabetes.
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) has decided to lower the Body Mass Index (BMI) cut point at which it recommends screening Asian Americans for type 2 diabetes. This change in ADA guidelines is aligned with evidence that many Asian Americans develop the disease at lower BMI levels than the population at large, according to a position statement being published in the January issue of Diabetes Care.
The liver and pancreas originate from the same embryonic lineage – the endoderm. In fact, both organs develop from the same original group of cells in the embryo. Because of this, they also share many genetic transcription factors and – perhaps most importantly – they each have a built-in glucose sensing system.
Using human embryonic stem cells as a base, the lab has pioneered a process that can reproduce human, insulin-producing beta cells on a large scale. As Melton said in a conference call with journalists, “What we’re reporting on is something that I think was obvious to many as a possible solution but just turned out to be difficult to achieve, and that is the creation of human beta cells that properly respond to sugar or glucose and secrete the right amount of insulin.”